Aiso for Hearing alleviates ‘cocktail party problem’

Some 80 per cent of adults aged between 40 and 64 find it hard to follow conversations in noise – with over 200 million people worldwide looking for a solution, according to the Cambridge-based company’s research. Aiso for Hearing has been demonstrated to improve speech understanding in noisy environments from five per cent to 98 per cent.

Assistive listening technologies, based on beamforming and noise suppression, provide a partial solution to the cocktail party problem. When hearing aids are used in noisy environments, they tend to amplify all the sounds – including the background noise – so the user still finds it difficult to follow the conversation.

Aiso for Hearing separates the speech signals from the surrounding noise, allowing a user to hear individual voices clearly, with the technology giving an improvement in the speech-to-noise ratio (SNR) of up to 30 decibels (dBs) compared with improvements ranging between only 2-4dBs for the directive beamformers typically found in hearing aids.