Thanks to AI, people with auditory neuropathy will soon have adaptive prostheses

Until now, there are no effective hearing aids for people who have difficulty hearing in noisy environments. A team from the Pasteur Institute started a study on volunteers with the help of artificial intelligence.

Imagine the sound of a badly tuned radio. A vibe is what one hears Suffered from auditory neuropathy in airplane takeoff. “It’s a very specific profile, explain Gregory Garenton, an engineer at the Center for Research and Innovation in Human Audiology (SERIA). They’ll mix up syllables, they’ll mix up a whole bunch of sounds.”

Ceriah, organized by the Pasteur Institute, launched refined studies in March 2022 to develop a hearing device equipped with AI and adapt to this pathology, which represents 10% of deafness. “In everyday conversation, They manage to catch on because they have context, because they have lip reading. It signals them.” Gregory Garenton continues. “Many situations are serious for them. Understanding will also be very problematic, for example, in a restaurant or during a meeting, with cars passing by on the street.”

Current hearing aids amplify and filter sounds but this does not help neuropathic patients. To meet their needs, researchers will first define exactly what the barriers are, thanks to tests performed on volunteers. For example, we make them hear sentences distorted or cut off by sound.

Prosthetics equipped with AI

The Lorraine University researchers will then test the algorithm on about forty volunteers, mostly young people who are still employed. Half of them hear well, the other half suffer from auditory neuropathy. “We will look at them every year and every year we will offer them speech enhancement algorithms, which we will develop with our partners and which, we hope, will help them understand speech better.” in detail Celine Quincek, Project Manager at the Institut Pasteur Research Centre.

“For example, if we have them listen to a text in year one, they might understand 50% of the words. We hope that in year 2, they will understand 70%, etc….”

Celine Quincek, Project Manager at the Institut Pasteur Research Centre

at franceinfo

The Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) must then develop hearing aids equipped with AI capable of separating speech from ambient noise, using algorithms tested on volunteers. CEA was approached precisely for its expertise in artificial intelligence and also for its ability to design autonomous electronic and computer systems subject to various constraints (memory, computing power, energy consumption, etc.).

According to the National Research Agency, the refined study is a first-of-its-kind initiative “Aiming to establish an end-to-end adaptive AI-based solution for patients suffering from hearing loss.”