A project to develop multimodal hearing aids that autonomously adapt to their surroundings has received £3.2m in EPSRC funding.
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.
Dr Ahsan Adeel, the programme’s Research and Innovation deputy director from Wolverhampton University, said: “Our vision 2050 is to go beyond 5G-IoT and internet, for internet-independent ‘brain-like’ on-chip processing to further address hearing aid’s size, power budget, communication, and cybersecurity issues.
“This EPSRC programme will provide the UK with a timely opportunity to improve hearing aid uptake, reduce NHS cost, and gain a leading position in the future multimodal hearing aid industry.
“The visionary research represents a step-change in how healthcare will be delivered in future.”
“It is fantastic to be co-leading this programme into creating the next generation of hearing aids,” added Professor Amar Aggoun, dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering. “The Faculty of Science and Engineering at Wolverhampton University is going from strength to strength with new facilities being invested in and research projects that make a truly positive impact, like this one will have, being undertaken by our researchers.”
The project partners include the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, and Nottingham as well as Heriot-Watt University and Sonova, Nokia Bell-Labs, Alpha Data, Digital Health & Care Institute, The Data Lab, and Action on Hearing Loss.
My wife wears hearing aids and one of her biggest complaints is the forever fiddly changing of batteries, often at the most inconvenient times. This is very off-putting to older people who have difficulty in handling the very tiny batteries and I often find these batteries scattered around my house. Whilst re-chargeable aids are currently available on the market, they are very expensive, usually in the £3000 area and currently not available on the NHS. In addition to the technology suggested above, it is vital that not only re-chargeable systems are incorporated, but also the cost is significantly reduced to allow hearing aids to be affordable not only to the NHS but also the general public.
Hearing aids are an interesting piece of electronic engineering. They must be pretty well the only tech whose price has risen almost continuously for the last 30 years or more.
Computers and for that matter most digital electronics have followed Moore’s law for decades, but hearing aids continue to buck the trend. I bet hard drive manufacturers would love to follow the hearing aid model!
I have hearing damage from my days as an industrial noise control installer, despite virtually living in high quality ear defenders for years. My first aid in 2015 was around £1600, rechargeable and fairly effective, unbelievably it was not even shower proof and in the end having a shower destroyed it.
My new aid bought about a month ago was some £1900, sure it has bluetooth and a few other bells and whistles, but essentially the same. The major difference is that it is not rechargeable. Why? Because the battery is non replaceable, so when its capacity drops off I have to throw the whole aid away and buy a new one, incredible.
How in this age of digital electronics do they get away with it?
The only other area I can think of is spectacles, where pretty much the same thing is happening.
Previous poster, please clarify because it does not make any sense that you are regularly throwing £1900 hearing aids in the bin.
I use two free but excellent NHS digital hearing aids and they have been life changing for the past 15 years, enabling me to continue working as a consultant. I change the (free) batteries every 2 weeks and it is no big deal. I bought wireless linked microphones that work in noisy places as well as connecting my phone and laptop for Zoom and Teams meetings. Currently WFH is a better experience for me than in person! The price may have risen but so has the quality and capability – from active noise suppression to frequency compensation for my hearing loss profile to name but two. They really work for me.
The reason I wound up with private aids was a wait of some 9 months for an audiologist’s appointment, once I had managed to get an ENT appointment first, the first one of which was 3 months down the road for me. So all told about a 1 year wait and the NHS now only gives out 2 aids to new patients if they are profoundly deaf.
My point was not the actual cost , but the fact that the cost continues to rise, which for digital electronics is pretty well unprecedented. I’d be pretty sure your last PC cost more than the one you have now, but your current one, will be significantly faster and more capable. My first hard drive in 1984 was a 10Mb one in a 19″ 2U rack unit, don’t remember what the access time was like but it was certainly faster than the floppies I used to use.
The cost then was north of £2000, in the hearing aid world that would mean that a 1Tb drive today would be 100,000 times as much, instead the last 1Tb spinning disc drive I bought was around £50 and even an SSD was less than £100