Assistive devices for people with hearing impairments have gone through plenty of changes and improvements over the decades, but most of them can still be easily identified as hearing aids. Wear takes a different approach to the hearing aid design.

The device looks like a large pendant necklace, but it is actually an array of 10 analog microphones that captures conversations and filters out the background noises. A six-foot perimeter surrounds the wearer and lets them hear close-up conversations while filtering out the sounds outside of that area.

The user wears earbuds connected to the pendant to transmit sounds. The team behind Wear points out that the device isn’t meant to replace hearing aids – it’s simply meant to help augment close-up conversations in noisy places. As an added bonus, the Wear can also be used to amplify the voices of public speakers to eliminate the need to carry a microphone.

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Being a mammal is pretty great in most respects – until you realize that we can’t regenerate damaged auditory hair cells like some other animals, that is. Once you’ve damaged your hearing, that damage is permanent. But maybe that won’t always be the case, because researchers from Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School are working on a solution that allows damaged mammalian auditory hair cells to renew themselves, bringing on partial hearing recovery.

Hearing can be damaged in a number of ways, including noise trauma, infections, certain drugs and natural aging. Hearing loss occurs when auditory hair cells, located in the cochlea of the inner ear, sustain damage. Hearing aids offer some help for people who have partial hearing loss, but they don’t actually fix what’s wrong. This new research could actually reverse the hearing loss, making hearing aids unnecessary.

The key to the research lies in a certain drug that, when applied to stem cells from the ears of mice, was able to stimulate regeneration of auditory hair cells. After applying these new cells to the cochlea of deaf mice, researchers observed partial hearing recovery. The method hasn’t yet been tested in humans, but the researchers are hopeful that their discovery could lead to reversing deafness in people as well as mice.

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When a person does not have use of one sense, it is often possible to use a different sense in its place. That is exactly how a system called EyeMusic works: when worn by a blind person, it substitutes audio “soundscapes” for sights. The system was created by a group of researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with the hope that it could eventually help visually impaired people navigate situations like grocery shopping more effectively. The system includes a camera attached to a pair of sunglasses and a pair of headphones that transmit sounds through the user’s skull rather than through the ears.

When looking at an object or a scene, a short, unique piece of music plays. Colors are represented by instruments (violin = yellow and trumpet = blue, for example) and an object’s position on the X and Y axes is represented by the pitch of the sounds. The system sounds a bit complicated, but in tests blindfolded subjects were able to catch on to its functionality very quickly. It will be a while before the system makes it into households, but the novel idea is a great start on the path to assistive devices for the blind.

The post High-Tech System For the Blind Substitutes Music for Sight first appeared on Gajitz.