STAR announces the award of a National Institutes of Health small-business grant, “Hear What I Want: An Acoustically Smart Personalized Common Room”. This will improve hearing healthcare by developing a hearing aid-compatible system that will identify the location and sounds of interfering acoustic sources and deliver an enhanced rendition of speech sounds from which interfering sources have been “scrubbed”.
Listeners with hearing deficits find noisy rooms, such as many classrooms and the common areas in assisted-living centers, burdensome because speech is hard to understand in rooms with multiple interfering sound sources.
This product will use multiple microphones permanently placed in a classroom or other complex space to isolate individual sound sources, identify and remove echoes, and upon request deliver personalized enhanced speech signals, from which masking sounds had been removed, to the ears of multiple listeners in the room via their cellphones and preferred listening devices.