- People wearing hearing aids often struggle to differentiate between speakers in a crowded environment, but a small experiment suggests that brain-controlled assistive hearing devices would be able to detect which voice the user is paying attention to, and enhance it.
"When you're focusing on one person who's speaking, your brain filters out the other sources and only 'sees' that," he told Reuters Health in a phone interview."If it's possible to use brainwaves for translational applications, it could change everything." Researchers tested the algorithm with three epilepsy patients who were already planning to undergo surgery to implant brain electrodes for measuring neural activity related to their condition. All three volunteers had normal hearing.
In addition to helping hearing-impaired users, the technology might one day be useful to anyone trying to pick out and amplify a single speaker in a noisy environment, they note.