{"id":141810,"date":"2024-06-07T11:16:28","date_gmt":"2024-06-07T15:16:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=141810"},"modified":"2025-04-15T19:52:40","modified_gmt":"2025-04-15T23:52:40","slug":"sound-solutions-building-smarter-hearing-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/sound-solutions-building-smarter-hearing-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"Sound Solutions: Building Smarter Hearing Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"

A classical psychoacoustician and a clinical audiologist, Professor David Eddins is regarded across the country for his research to address hearing impairments and his discoveries leading to the improvement of diagnostic tools and hearing enhancement devices. He joined the College of Health Professions and Sciences<\/a>(CHPS) last fall with more than three decades of research in the speech, voice and hearing sciences. At UCF, he\u2019s ramping up his pioneering work to develop assistive technology solutions that improve the quality of life for people with hearing challenges and create more effective tools for the clinicians treating them.<\/p>\n

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), approximately 15% of American adults, or 37.5 million people, report some trouble hearing. The developments taking place in Eddins\u2019 newly created Communication Technologies Research Center have implications for children and adults facing hearing challenges that stem from trauma, disease and neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as those with age-related conditions and for patients like professional singers or athletes who rely on voice, respiratory and speech health.<\/p>\n

The center, based in the CHPS Office of Research, targets four focal areas: voice and upper airway disorders, auditory neuroscience, hearing technologies and simulation technologies. It includes Eddins\u2019 longtime associates, Research Professor Shaheen Awan and Research Assistant Professor Yeonggwang \u201cPaul\u201d Park, both of whom also joined CHPS in Fall 2023, and Ann Clock Eddins, who is a professor and director of the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders and brings research expertise in auditory neuroscience. New to the center this summer are Assistant Professor Andy Dykstra and Research Assistant Professor Monica Folkerts. Plans are in place to hire five additional faculty members in the months ahead.<\/p>\n

A More Intelligent Hearing Aid<\/h2>\n

Eddins comes to UCF after 13 years at the University of South Florida (USF) where he served as the director of the Auditory and Speech Sciences Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research facility dedicated to improving hearing and communication. For the last two years, he and his team have been working to develop a \u201csmart\u201d hearing aid that can predict the intent of a user and intuitively change the way it processes sound to meet the goals of the wearer.<\/p>\n

Hearing aids made with today\u2019s technology simply process sound and don\u2019t know anything about the wearer\u2019s intent or how they want to interact (or not) with sounds and the environment. Eddins is creating a device that uses accelerometers to receive data about head movements and provide indicators of what the user is doing and their hearing needs, which in turn enables the device to adjust itself accordingly.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine you\u2019re really engaged in conversation and you\u2019re nodding up and down, shaking your head left and right, laughing and talking. Those actions and movements may be associated with turn taking and looking at communication partners and can convey that you\u2019re trying to understand what\u2019s going on,\u201d Eddins says. \u201cIn that situation, you might want the hearing aid signal processing to be aggressive to maximize clarity of other people\u2019s speech and focus on individual speakers, and for background noise to be minimized.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to making current hearing aids available more intelligent, the technology could also be extended to cochlear implants and any other head worn systems developed in the future, including the possibility of small, head mounted chips that interface with smartphones.<\/p>\n

Grants from the hearing aid manufacturer Sonova support the project, which is in early stages. Eddins and his collaborators are currently examining the accelerometer technology available, establishing benchmarks for accuracy, and studying and coding head movements during natural conversations to better infer patterns. Eventually, they\u2019ll tie the patterns of head movement and measures from other sensor technologies to the associated communication actions.<\/p>\n