Curtin University of Technology researchers are developing equipment to help hearing impaired people communicate while working in noisy environments.

Professors Sven Nordholm and Kevin Fynn won a $358,000 Australian Research Council grant to optimise their existing high noise communication devices which amplify speech while muffling background noise, for workers with hearing loss.

“People who work in loud environments can’t use hearing aids and earplugs or ear muffs at the same time,” Professor Nordholm says.

“We will develop a system that will separate speech from background noise, and then boost it to allow the hearing impaired to hear in noisy environments.”

The research builds on Speech Enhancing Noise Suppression technology previously developed by the Curtin professors and since 2006 has been sold to companies around the world in industries such as mining, aviation, manufacturing and construction through Perth manufacturer Sensear.

It enables face-to-face, mobile phone and two-way radio and short range communication. in extreme noise environments of about 120 decibels.

Professor Nordholm says making the product accessible to hearing-impaired people was the next logical step and was requested by Sensear customers.

“It’s an important aspect in these high noise environments where you have a lot of people with hearing loss already,” he says.

“There’s been a need already from the start of the project, but we didn’t have the time and capacity previously, it’s been on our agenda for quite some time.

“It’s a much more complex area of research than the initial work was. With hearing loss you need to compensate for certain frequency bands with a high gain, and with that high gain there is other problems that follow, like feedback in your headset, so there’s many other aspects to consider. So from a scientific point of view it’s a very interesting problem.”

The grant was awarded in January and research began in March but Professor Nordholm says they still have a long way to go.

“We haven’t come that far yet. The first step in to improve the previous algorithms and the next step is to look at different types of perceptions and to identify cues in speech.”
Sven thinks the problem of hearing loss will never be completely solved and that finding ways to improve specific aspects is more fruitful.

“There is a lot of research being done into hearing loss but we are really the first ones looking into problems which have these high noise levels, that’s not a normal thing when you use hearing aids. Hearing aids basically don’t work at all in these kinds of environments.”

The technology is limited to sound a human ear would be able to pick up without hearing protection, it is not able to extrapolate sound coming from further away.

“Technology is still not better than our human hearing, particularly when there is a lot of noise in the background.

“We are quite good at picking up speech because we’ve been trained to do that since a young age,” Professor Nordholm says.

He thinks this next stage of the technology will go into production within two years, with further research continuing for many more years.

The researchers are looking into combining Sensear with communication assistance for blind people that other Curtin researchers are developing, and for voice input to Bluetooth headsets which Sven was working on before the Sensear project.