Solving the "cocktail party problem".

• Position: Hearing Aids

A potential breakthrough in solving a 50-year-old problem in hearing technology--how to help the hearing-impaired understand speech in the midst of background noise--has been made by computer engineers and hearing scientists at Ohio State University, Columbus. They used the latest developments in neural networks to boost test subjects' recognition of spoken words from as low as 10% to as high as 90%.

The researchers hope the technology will pave the way for next-generation digital hearing aids, which even could reside inside smartphones; the phones would do the computer processing and broadcast the enhanced signal to ultra-small earpieces wirelessly. Several patents are pending on the technology.

Conquering background noise has been a "holy grail" in hearing technology for half a century, explains Eric Healy, professor of speech and hearing science and director of the Speech Psychoacousfics Laboratory. The desire to understand one voice in a roomful of chatter has been dubbed the "cocktail party problem?

"Focusing on what one person is saying and ignoring the rest is something that normal-hearing listeners are very good at, and hearing-impaired listeners are very bad at," Healy explains. "We've come up with a way to do the job for them, and make their limitations moot."

Key to the technology is a computer algorithm developed by DeLiang "Leon" Wang, professor of computer science and engineering, and his team. It quickly analyzes speech and removes most of the background noise.

"For 50 years, researchers have...