Eric Healy, associate professor, Department of Speech and Hearing Science, and DeLiang Wang, professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, were awarded a five-year $1.8 million grant from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders. They will develop an algorithm to improve speech reception in noise by hearing-impaired listeners.

“Poor reception of speech in background noise is the primary complaint made by the millions who have hearing loss,” says Healy.

Healy and Wang, together with graduate students Sarah Yoho and Yuxuan Wang, have recently provided the first demonstration of intelligibility improvements by hearing-impaired listeners. All listeners in their study demonstrated improvements in sentence recognition following processing. Further, these improvements were often quite substantial, as many listeners who were unable to understand any speech at all demonstrated near-perfect sentence recognition after processing.

This work has the potential to revolutionize our treatment of hearing loss.

Healy was elected a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in 2012. Only persons who have attained eminence in acoustics or who have rendered outstanding service to acoustics may be elected to honorary fellowship.

In 2009, he was awarded $2.0 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to perform research aimed at clarifying how humans process speech, and how this process is impacted by hearing loss or background noise.

Healy completed his BA and MS in cognitive psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a predoctoral fellowship at NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Japan.  He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1998, followed by postdoctoral training at Arizona State University.

He is associate editor of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.