Multimodal hearing aids adapt to their surroundings

Co-led by Wolverhampton University and led by Edinburgh Napier University, the multidisciplinary research programme has been funded under EPSRC’s ‘Transformative Healthcare Technologies for 2050’ scheme.

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Around 12 million people in Britain suffer from hearing loss, which costs the NHS approximately £450m per year. By 2050 nearly 2.5 billion people globally are predicted to have some degree of hearing loss. Despite this, hearing aids uptake is as low as 40 per cent, and most people who have the device do not use it often enough.

Said to be inspired by human speech perception in everyday noisy situations, that usually require both aural and visual senses, the funded four-year Cognitively-Inspired 5G-IoT Enabled Multi‐Modal Hearing Aids (COG-MHEAR) programme is developing the world’s first multimodal hearing aids, designed to autonomously adapt to their surroundings, resulting in greater intelligibility and potentially reduced listening effort.