Researchers developing vision wear designed to enhance auditory perception for increased audibility
Scottish Scientists Develop AI-Powered Hearing Glasses for Improved Conversations
Scientists at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland are leading a project to develop smart hearing glasses that use lip-reading technology, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing to help people hear conversations more clearly in real-time.
The glasses, which are currently in the prototype stage, capture video of the speaker's lips and send the audio and visual data to cloud servers for processing. The AI in the glasses isolates the speaker's voice and removes background noise from the audio. The cleaned-up audio is then sent back to the listener's hearing aid almost instantly.
The smart glasses are designed to help people with hearing loss, as over 1.2 million UK adults face difficulties with ordinary conversations due to hearing loss, according to the Royal National Institute for Deaf People.
The project, which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, collaborates with researchers from the University of Edinburgh, Napier University, and the University of Stirling. The team is currently discussing ways to reduce costs and make the devices more widely available with hearing aid manufacturers.
The smart glasses use audio-visual speech enhancement, meaning the AI exploits the correlation between lip movements and speech sounds to accurately separate voices. This approach overcomes limitations of traditional hearing aids and noise-cancelling technology, which often struggle with overlapping speech and complex background noise.
The goal is to give hearing aids "superpowers," not to reinvent them. The researchers aim to have a working version of the smart hearing glasses by 2026.
In addition to the smart hearing glasses, other AI-aided hearing support innovations exist, such as glasses that convert speech into text on lenses for those with hearing impairments. However, the core focus of the upcoming 'hearing glasses' is on real-time audio enhancement via AI lip-reading and cloud processing.
[1] Smart hearing glasses: AI-powered audio enhancement for those with hearing loss
[2] Scottish scientists develop AI-powered hearing glasses
[3] AI-powered hearing glasses to help those with hearing loss
[4] AI-powered smart glasses for the hearing impaired
- These AI-powered smart glasses, developed by Scottish scientists, aim to enhance audio for individuals with hearing loss using technology like lip-reading, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing.
- The innovative AI-powered smart glasses under development use lip movements and speech sounds correlation, along with cloud processing, to provide real-time audio enhancement, benefiting those confronting hearing loss.
