Hearing aid research
Technology is always improving, and Deafness Research UK is supporting several ground-breaking research projects, aimed at improving hearing aid and testing technology.
Communicating more effectively in noisy environments
The majority of hard of hearing people find it difficult to communicate successfully in noisy environments, regardless of the type of hearing aid they have. One Deafness Research UK researcher, Dr David McAlpine, is working to discover the precise hearing mechanisms by which humans process complex sounds, so that cochlear implants and hearing aids can be modified in ways which will help hard of hearing people to communicate more effectively in noisy backgrounds.
Improving evaluation and fitting procedures
Deafness Research UK researcher, Professor Brian Moore, based in Cambridge, is working to improve the fitting of hearing aids by developing more accurate ways of measuring hearing loss at different frequencies. Because the impaired cochlear cannot process sounds effectively, even with new technology, amplifying sounds accurately is challenging. As hearing does not generally deteriorate evenly across all frequencies (pitches), a hearing aid should provide more amplification in the frequencies where it is needed. However, in some people, sounds at certain frequencies either cannot be heard even when highly amplified or are heard with distorted pitch and tone quality. People affected in this way are said to have 'dead' hearing regions; to understand speech well, people need to hear both high and low frequencies well. Therefore people with dead regions need more sophisticated hearing aids.
This project, supported by the Grand Charity of Freemasons, aims to devise a set of signals which it is hoped can be incorporated into standard testing procedures to enable accurate diagnosis of patterns of hearing loss and identification of 'dead' regions.
Developing more effective sound processing technologies
In everyday life, variations in pitch give a sense of melody in musical sounds and help convey the intonation of the voice for speech sounds. Researchers have shown how hearing-impaired people can experience a variety of changes in the way that they perceive the pitch of single 'pure' tones, but much less is known about the perception of complex tones, such as those produced by musical instruments or the human voice.
Deafness Research UK researchers are currently studying ways in which the perception of these complex tones is affected by a hearing impairment, with the aim of improving our understanding of the hearing mechanism. Eventually, researchers hope this work will lead to the development of hearing aids that can more effectively compensate for problems in understanding the human voice and other complex sounds.
Other research
Other research being carried out includes looking at improving the look of hearing aids and communication between bilateral hearing aids.
