A Breakthrough for Treating Hearing Loss

September 24, 2013

A Breakthrough for Treating Hearing Loss

Eric Healy, professor of speech and hearing science and director of Ohio State’s Speech Psychoacoustics Laboratory, and DeLiang Wang, professor of computer science and engineering, have provided the first demonstration of a processing algorithm capable of improving speech understanding in noise for hearing-impaired listeners.

"It's an important problem because poor speech understanding in background noise is the number one complaint of hearing-impaired listeners," said Healy, the study's lead author. "People with hearing loss are simply not good at pulling speech from background noise—because this algorithm does that job for them, their limitations are rendered moot."

Together, with PhD students Sarah Yoho and Yuxuan Wang, Healy and DeLiang Wang showed substantial gains in intelligibility, allowing some listeners to improve recognition from near zero to over 70 percent accuracy. The algorithm was so effective that it allowed the hearing-impaired participants to actually outperform listeners with normal hearing.

Despite decades of effort by many groups around the globe, an algorithm to successfully extract speech from noise has proven highly elusive. It is hoped that this approach, called "a hearing aid on steroids" by one study participant, can someday be implemented into hearing aids and cochlear implants to improve quality of life for millions of people.

The results are to appear in the October issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Healy’s work on spectro-temporal speech information and other auditory topics is funded by a number of sources, including the National Institutes of Health and Sun Microsystems.

Healy received his BA and MS in cognitive psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He completed a predoctoral research fellowship at NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Japan, the PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and postdoctoral training at Arizona State University. He teaches courses on hearing science, speech perception, and cochlear implants, and serves as the department’s PhD program coordinator and graduate studies chair.

News Filters: