Latest news with #RoyalNationalInstituteforDeafPeople
The Herald Scotland
12-08-2025
- Science
- The Herald Scotland
AI-powered ‘hearing glasses' could help filter out background noise in real time
The technology combines lip-reading technology, artificial intelligence and cloud computing, and uses a small camera built into glasses to track the speaker's lip movements while a smartphone app uses 5G to send both audio and visual data to a powerful cloud server. AI then isolates the speaker's voice from surrounding noise and sends the cleaned-up sound back to the listener's hearing aid or headphones almost instantly. More than 1.2 million adults in the UK have hearing loss severe enough to make ordinary conversation difficult, according to the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, and the impact of hearing aids can be limited in noisy places. Researchers hope to have a working version of the glasses by 2026. They are speaking to hearing aid manufacturers about future partnerships and hope to reduce costs to make the devices more widely available. Scientists have collected noise samples, from washing machines to traffic, to improve the system's training. Project leader Professor Mathini Sellathurai, of Heriot-Watt University, said: 'We're not trying to reinvent hearing aids. We're trying to give them superpowers. 'You simply point the camera or look at the person you want to hear. 'Even if two people are talking at once, the AI uses visual cues to extract the voice of the person you're looking at.' This approach, known as audio-visual speech enhancement, takes advantage of the close link between lip movements and speech. Some noise-cancelling technologies already exist, but struggle with overlapping voices or complex background sounds — something this system aims to overcome. By shifting the heavy processing work to cloud servers — some as far away as Stockholm — the researchers can apply powerful deep-learning algorithms without overloading the small, wearable device. The technology is still in the prototype stage but researchers have tested the technology with people who use hearing aids and said early results are promising. Prof Sellathurai said: 'There's a slight delay, since the sound travels to Sweden and back, but with 5G, it's fast enough to feel instant. 'One of the most exciting parts is how general the technology could be. 'It's aimed to support people who use hearing aids and who have severe visual impairments, but it could help anyone working in noisy places, from oil rigs to hospital wards. 'There are only a few big companies that make hearing aids and they have limited support in noisy environments. 'We want to break that barrier and help more people, especially children and older adults, access affordable, AI-driven hearing support.' The project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Yahoo
11-08-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
I didn't realise how bad my hearing was until I had my ear wax removed
There's a crackling, like someone tuning an old radio, then a violent pop as if a champagne cork exploded near my head. And all of a sudden I can hear. The hum of the air conditioning, a shout from the street outside, distant traffic; the world which had been a dull and distant fog to me comes rushing in. The process of restoring my hearing has taken a while. Three weeks ago, the Telegraph Health editor asked if I'd be willing to be videoed getting my ears cleaned out. 'What?' I responded, wondering why my editor might want a video of beer-weaned trout. When I told my partner about this assignment, he was delighted, reeling off all the times I'd accused him of mumbling when, he claimed, his volume was normal. 'I'm sure it's not that bad,' I demurred. Later, as we ate our blackened dinner – I hadn't heard the oven timer going off – I conceded that he may have a point. In 2019, earwax removal services, formerly free to access at GPs practices, were removed from the roster of 'core services' GPs were obliged to provide. Six years later, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) says it's a postcode lottery as to whether those who need the treatment can get it. According to the RNID, 2.3 million Britons suffer with excess wax requiring professional removal every year, leaving many people vulnerable to reduced hearing. Just as in my case, hearing loss is often detected by family or friends rather than the person experiencing it, says Mitan Katelia, the pharmacist who first checked my ears. 'Our busiest time for hearing checks is after Christmas,' he explains. 'It becomes evident which forces people to act.' It's partly down to the stigma around hearing, thinks Dr Krishan Ramdoo, a former ENT surgeon who founded TympaHealth, the UK's largest provider of hearing assessment technology. 'If you woke up and you couldn't see, you would seek medical attention,' he says. 'But when people experience hearing loss, they muddle on and find ways to get around it.' That's me. I've always had intermittent hearing loss. If I ever go swimming, I'll be near-deaf in at least one ear for a week or so. Similarly if I get a cold I sometimes wake up with a blocked ear for a few days. It's annoying but I remind myself to say 'I beg your pardon?' instead of 'what?', and hope it'll sort itself out. This is not the course of action recommended by Dr Ramdoo. 'Hearing is hugely important to our health. Hearing loss is the single biggest modifiable risk factor in the prevention of dementia,' he tells me. 'When you lose your hearing you automatically feel disengaged with your environment so it leads to social isolation. If you have untreated hearing loss you're also three times more likely to have a fall.' I've seen all of these issues personally. My grandmother refused hearing aids and soon began complaining that she couldn't follow conversations. She became reclusive and, after a fall landed her in hospital, she was diagnosed with dementia. But I'm 31, not 81, surely this shouldn't matter so much to me? 'Maybe not yet, but the World Health Organisation thinks that by 2030 hearing loss will overtake diabetes and cataracts in the top 10 burdens on global health,' says Dr Ramdoo. 'We're wearing headphones all the time, going to loud concerts, sitting beside busy roads – our ears didn't evolve to cope with these constant micro-traumas.' Soon Katelia had his camera and suction tube in my ear. 'Hmm,' he said. 'You have a lot of wax in there.' 'What?' I replied. 'A lot of wax!' he bellowed. My other ear was the same. Katelia showed me the videos he had taken (click to watch below). In each of my ear canals sat a hard ball of wax, both so old that they'd had lost their golden hue and morphed into a pair of pitch black clumps. Part of the problem is that I have the tightest ear canals Katelia has ever seen among the thousands of patients he has worked on (I'm slightly proud of this superlative.) I was dispatched with a bottle of olive oil and told to put a few drops into my dainty little ears every morning and night to help soften the wax. Given that cotton buds are strictly forbidden (they just push the wax further back into the ear and can damage the ear drum which can lead to permanent deafness) olive oil is usually the first port of call for home remedies. For most people it'll soften the wax enough for it to come out on its own. A week later I was back in his clinic; 'a lot has come out,' Katelia advised. But the black clumps were still firmly in post, if a little frayed around the edges. I was sent away again, this time with the next step up from olive oil: sodium bicarbonate drops to soften the lumps. I left thinking about a scene from Dreamworks's 2001 film Shrek where the ogre extracts a glob of wax from his ear so big he can make a candle from it. The following week I was visited by Katelia's colleague, the Pearl Pharmacy Group's brightest talent when it comes to removing earwax. After a quick inspection, we were off again: the microsuction machine at full whack. My pharmacist glaring into my ear with intense concentration, sweat beading across her brow. The machine was emitting a high pitched whine. 'Keep going,' I demanded. 'I can feel it moving.' 'I'm giving it all she's got, Captain!' the pharmacist snapped back. For one brief, golden moment, it felt like she'd got it – my hearing suddenly clicked into high-definition. I could hear like never before. But then the microsuction hose retracted and it was blocked again. The pharmacist was able to open up a small hole between my ear drum and the canal, but the wax soon slipped back. It shifted, but remained unextractable. 'I really believe I can do it,' the pharmacist said with determination. 'I don't want to use too much force because your ear canals are so tight I can't see around the wax. For all I know it's adhered to your ear drum. If I turn the suction up too much it could rip a hole in it.' When I returned in three days time it was the same story: a glimmer of success, but no cigar. With nothing more to be done, I'm referred upwards. Dr Ramdoo's friend, a fellow ENT specialist, Joseph Manjaly sees me at his private clinic. When I arrive he's already seen my file and the videos that the pharmacy had sent. 'Are my ear canals the tightest you've seen?' I demand. 'Definitely in the top 10, I'd say,' Manjaly says. I am mollified. 'But it's not the worst case I've ever dealt with.' The end being in sight now, I wonder how big a difference to my hearing I should expect. One thing I find most annoying is that when I'm in a noisy environment – a busy restaurant for instance – my ears tend to lock onto whatever the loudest sound is (invariably an American having a personal conversation) and then tune out everything else. 'That happens because your hearing isn't great and your brain gets worn out by trying to sort through all the different sounds, so it just fixates on whatever is easiest for it to hear,' Manjaly explains. 'Once the wax is out that shouldn't be a problem any more.' Then we're away, there's the crackling as the last of the olive oil gets slurped out and then the pop of the wax plug springing forth. The globules of black grime aren't as big as I expected – each is about the size of my little fingertip – but are satisfyingly disgusting. After he's finished, Manjaly gives me a hearing test. The results? 'Perfectly average.' Since my ears have been cleaned, I no longer have to lean in close to hear someone in a crowded room, I can hear approaching cars, I've never missed the oven timer. The world suddenly feels crisp and defined; it's the equivalent of having spent the past few years watching a flickering old TV then upgrading to a high-definition 4K cinema screen. What I'm surprised by is how much I'd been compensating. A few weeks ago, I'd have said my hearing was basically fine. I'm just discovering how much I couldn't hear. For most of us, hearing gradually declines from the age of 35. Given we know how badly hearing loss affects us, it's worth a check up, isn't it? Take my experiences as proof that just because you think you can hear doesn't mean you can and if you're always complaining about your partner mumbling, maybe the problem lies in your ears. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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Otago Daily Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Cut the noise, put ambience back on the menu
Bare concrete walls, open kitchens and tinny speakers mean it is harder than ever to hear your fellow diners. Dann Wallace meets the people fighting for quiet. When I ask a New Yorker called Greg Scott to recommend a quiet spot in town, two words spring instantly to his mind. "Burp Castle." It's in the East Village, wood-panelled, with burgers and banana-bread beer, murals, staff in monk robes and a stereo that if it plays at all plays very quiet Gregorian chants. Scott likes it because "if you're too loud, the bar staff soon quieten you down". There's a ban on "loud talking". Signs on the wall encourage you only to whisper. Others just read "Ssssh!" One five-star review on Yelp says, "The silence is all consuming." "The staff look mad if you get loud," says Scott. "They put their fingers on their lips. They might shush you." And if they shush you, everyone else in Burp Castle shushes you too. This is not a middle-aged rant. Anyone who is older than they were yesterday knows that restaurants seem louder these days, just as light seems lower, chairs seem harder, fonts seem tinier. Actually, perhaps this is a middle-aged rant. According to a survey by SoundPrint (an app that measures decibel levels), Europe's loudest restaurants are in London. At the top? A place in the centre of town with a regular ambience of 97dB. For context, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People says anything above 90db is like sitting next to a running motorbike, plus you're indoors and hungry. Prolonged exposure to even 85dB can lead to hearing damage. And yes, I'm that guy in his 40s suddenly surprised he can't follow conversation around a table in some packed high-ceilinged industrial joint, as his companions laugh delightedly over who knows what. You're supposed to engage in communal storytelling, but there are only so many times you can go "Say again?" before you just pretend and go "Haha yeah!" That's why I'd like to go to Burp Castle. Scott likes Burp Castle because he too found himself overwhelmed by restaurant noise. "I first noticed it dating in New York. Choosing venues became hard. I was nervous because you don't know what you'll get. Will it be quiet? And I realised one night, I just couldn't make out a single thing my date was saying. "It made me feel frustrated. Awkward. Everything was just so loud." So Scott did what anyone would do. He designed SoundPrint, the app that discovered London is motorbike-loud and let people publish restaurant decibels. Scott found an army of people desperate to "be heard over the noise". And by noise, he means ... "The clatter of knives. Chairs scraping concrete. The bar, the shouts. The espresso machine just roaring. Conversations overheard because people are squished together. The guys a few tables down, talking loudly because the [music] speaker above them is angled right at them, and that means the table next to them have to talk even louder to be heard ... " "The Lombard effect!" Carl Hopkins says. Prof Carl Hopkins PhD BEng CEng MASA MIIAV FIOA has so many letters after his name that when you first get an email from him you worry he has collapsed on his keyboard. He is the head of the acoustics research unit at the University of Liverpool and when we speak about ever noisier restaurant chatter he says, "The Lombard effect is the involuntary tendency we have to increase our vocal effort in loud places to make sure other people can hear us." This doesn't just increase volume, he says. It also changes the very way we speak: pitch, tone, rate and even the duration of our syllables. "And as the restaurant starts to fill up with customers, everyone needs to talk louder in their group to be heard, and the level increases until everybody is basically shouting." Now include music from some devious ceiling speaker and we're forced to talk louder still. Add a heavy pour of pinot noir and our usual social inhibitions disappear altogether. Hopkins thinks restaurants should take care to limit that extra sound. Problem is, that's not fashionable; it's not the 1980s and these are not absorptive times. We are in reflective mood, because "right now restaurants like surfaces that reflect sound, not absorb it". Forget thick velvet curtains. Forget tablecloths or the plush hush of shag pile. Think micro-concrete polished floors. Enormous windows and glazed facades. Exposed triple-height ceilings, metal pipework, wipe-clean surfaces, those super-thin water glasses that go "ting!" if someone even glances their way. Open kitchens "full of shiny, noise-generating tools", which I think is a very rude thing to call chefs. Instead, restaurants should consider how to suck up the chatter and clatter. "Carpets are sound absorbent," Hopkins says, "but they also absorb food and drink." Jonathan Downey is a successful restaurateur launching a new place next month on London's Drury Lane, called Town, and he really doesn't want it carpeted. "They're trip hazards and a bit suburban. Though you get them in old Mayfair restaurants; the ones where all the customers look half dead." He wants a solid wood floor "but I'm concerned how it'll sound. We'll adapt, using 'sound baffling' where we can. We're using sound-absorbent tiles on columns and walls, we've got about 30 large panels in there, special paint, and we're avoiding flat surfaces. But you need people eating to know if it works." At the least, there won't be tinkly piped-in music to compete with. "No chef should be playing Oasis. I don't know why so many places play Oasis. I don't want to sit in a restaurant listening to Oasis dribbling out of awful little speakers. If I wanted Radio 2 out of a tinny speaker, I'd eat in my car." Downey has launched bars and restaurants across London, and in Somerset, New York and Chamonix. He likes the detail of it all, "the lighting, the smell, the sound — the whole experience. "The chairs." The chairs? "Chairs are a key consideration," he says. "We're looking at the chairs and thinking, 'Is this a two-hour chair or a four-hour chair?' If it's a two-hour chair, can we make it a four-hour chair with a seat pad, or by adding arms? A lot of people want customers in and out. I want them to feel like they want to come back next week with friends. So we spend time in every chair at every table, and we ask, 'Is this a good place to sit? Am I at ease? Can I hear?"' A restaurant can't thrive in a fug of sound, he says. "You want it to buzz. You want it to hum. But you want your table to feel private because you can't hear the conversations of others and others can't hear yours." And if there is music, it should be "something that people like without even knowing what it is". "Done wrong, music is annoying, distracting. Done right, it massively impacts your night without drawing focus. Like a Hans Zimmer score. Like a soundtrack to the evening." Lars Bork Andersen is resident soundtrack designer at Alchemist — the two-Michelin-starred Rasmus Munk restaurant in Refshaleoen, a remote and industrial part of Copenhagen — for which you need six-hour chairs. For $NZ1332 a head, diners are served nearly 50 bite-sized dishes, including a sheep's brain filled with cherry sauce and a freeze-dried butterfly. "I definitely see [what I do] as a score," Andersen says. "I see it as one big six-hour soundtrack." Usually, he says, restaurants pump out loud music to mask mundane backstage sounds — plates clearing, cutlery dumped into sinks, empty bottles bashing metal bins — and as a tool to "force people to think they are having a good time". But sound can bring good times more effectively: what Andersen does is ditch three-minute dad rock and create a rolling ambience that gets people to hyper-focus on the evening. "Music that has background emotional impact. As if the music in the restaurant was part of the tapestry, or like the paint on the walls." Dramatic audio moments may silence a room as a dish is served under projections cast on to a vast 3-D dome above, before the sounds retreat and the room fills with excited chatter and the rare noise of shared joy. "Some of the dishes have political messages," he says. "Maybe about plastic in oceans." (Diners are served a piece of cod with edible "plastic".) "And I'll create an underwater soundscape. Or we have this one ice-cream which is shaped like a droplet of blood." (It's a pig's blood ice-cream.) "And there's a QR code on the plate. And you scan it to become an organ donor. And there is a big beating heart in the middle of the dome. And soft music. And the sound of rhythmic heartbeats. "With red colours, and blood vessels flowing. And, visually, you look up and you are in a chest cavity." "I'm sure it's wonderful," I say. "But it sounds horrific." "But people will start talking about these topics. Talking together. About recycling. Or child labour. With the space for them to do this given by the support of the soundtrack." Ronnie van der Veer is a foley artist based just outside Amsterdam, creating sound effects for film and television — including, of course, hundreds of dining scenes. He seems a good person to ask what restaurants should sound like. "When I think about what annoys me in a restaurant," he says, "it's usually sharp sound. Knives and forks clinking. Loud conversation. Echoes that make five people sound like 20. You also don't want a silent restaurant. I think 'mellow' is the word." He's got a particular dislike of glass. "Glass tables. Glass walls. Glass makes everything sound harsh. "Imagine the noise of a wine glass set down quickly on a glass table. It immediately makes you uneasy." He says a good restaurant "does not surprise you" with noise. "The worst sounds are those that interrupt focus. Sharp sounds, scraping. As an audio artist, you don't want to distract your audience. You want a sense of distance from others. In my studio, I choose my props carefully for sound quality. "Restaurants should do the same. So I choose glasses that have a nice ring. Crystal glasses sound much nicer than, say, an Ikea glass. Some knives sound too dull or aggressive when placed on a table, so I pick ones with a pleasing tone. Small things like the right combination of knife and plate can make an enormous difference." The last time Scott left the kind of noisy New York restaurant that triggered the birth of an app, it was with "a sense of complete relief. When you get out of a place like that your shoulders are lighter. You can breathe again. Hear again. The world is quieter again". He knows he is not alone. He knows because of the emails he gets from other people who fail to understand why eating out should require ear defenders or employing a live subtitler. So is this a rant? I hope not. I hope it's just seeing if we can all agree that restaurants aren't supposed to make you feel pleased to be back out on the street again. The best restaurants make you pleased someone chose the right combination of knife and plate, even if you have no idea they did. They make you delighted someone has gone to the trouble of thinking about a four-hour chair, even if the thought of one never crossed your mind. And they make you relieved you don't have to tell your date that you'd rather get out of here and head instead to a little place in the East Village you only just read about. A quiet corner, where you can hear me, and I can hear you, and which I am going to mumble the name of, so you don't quite understand when I tell you it's called Burp Castle. Sound check Check out Soundprint for its Otago restaurant noise ratings which go from a quiet 60dB in some local cafes to a very loud 85dB at some of the region's burger joints. — The Observer
Tom's Guide
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Tom's Guide
Can you hear that? Sonos just made it easier to actually listen to what people say in movies
The rewind button on my TV remote is worn to the point of exhaustion. It feels like every time I want to watch a movie at home, the soundtrack is so loud it could wake up the neighbors a block away, but the dialogue is like a whisper. I pause, rewind 10 seconds, double the volume and scrunch my face in concentration as I try to work out what the characters actually said to move the plot along. It's a frustrating and time wasting dance, but I always wonder how much more difficult it must be for people with hearing loss. Though, I think I might have found the one AI feature that is actually useful in real life. Sonos (yes, that Sonos, the company that decided to annoy every single one of its customers with a badly thought out app update last year), just announced a new AI-powered Speech Enhancement feature. According to a Sonos Newsroom post, the company has managed to use machine learning to separate dialogue from other audio in real time. This means no more temporary volume adjustments as you try to navigate blasting soundtrack and mumbling dialogue. It'll roll out as a free update to the Sonos Arc Ultra soundbar from May 13, 2025. Whether it comes to other Sonos devices in the future remains to be seen, but let's hope this software update is less dramatically catastrophic than the app debacle from last year. The feature, developed in collaboration with the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), will be available as a tiered setting in the Sonos app, allowing you to toggle between low, medium, high, and max enhancement levels. Low through high are designed for people like me who just can't pick out the dialogue in otherwise noisy films, but the max setting specifically caters to people with hearing loss. In this mode, the software enhances the speech but also adjusts 'non-speech' elements to elevate the dialogue. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. I've owned Sonos speakers for about a decade, but I lost a lot of trust in the company after the terrible mess they made of the app last year. Even all this time later, I still have to wait up to 30 seconds just to change a track. But it's rare that tech companies actually prioritize accessibility. Making sure that everyone can access and enjoy the things they like should be a core part of any product. And if Sonos spends time on this, and can encourage other brands making some of the best soundbars, then maybe I'll be able to forgive its past mistakes.
ITV News
24-04-2025
- Health
- ITV News
'I had to tell my dad he had cancer': Families speak out about 'serious failings' in deaf healthcare
The daughter of a deaf man who died from cancer says his care was impacted by a severe lack of sign language provision. Kate Boddy's father, who lived near Mold, was diagnosed with cancer in 2022, but when the NHS was unable to provide a BSL interpreter, she was forced to deliver the news. She said: "The healthcare providers relied on me to do all that interpreting. I had to suppress every emotion to be able to translate, and it wasn't just at that moment. It was right the way through his treatment up until he died. "In the process, I forgot to be a daughter, I didn't have the opportunity to be a daughter. Cancer stole his life, but the failures of the NHS and the lack of access to interpreters stole time from us." Throughout his treatment, Kate says the lack of provision also meant her father was unable to connect with support groups or even access resources about his treatment. Kate said, "He was a proud deaf BSL user. "He was proud of his language, he had limited understanding of written and spoken British English because BSL is such a different language to English. "He was used to not having that access and campaigned for improvements, and unfortunately, they never happened and didn't happen in time for him." In Wales, more than 900 people have BSL as their main language and nearly 600,00 people are deaf and hard of hearing. Kate has now joined calls for more to be done to improve the provision of BSL interpreters across all healthcare settings, to address what are described as "serious and widespread failings". A Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) report found that seven out of ten deaf people and people with hearing loss in Wales have never been asked about their communication needs within a healthcare setting. The report also found that almost one in ten people who are deaf or have hearing loss have avoided calling an ambulance or attending A&E because of "inaccessible communication". Martin and his wife, Denise, are both deaf and said they have faced the same issues in the healthcare system. "She's had to go into hospital on a number of occasions as an emergency patient, and each time she's not had access to a British Sign Language interpreter, so therefore she's struggled to communicate", Martin said. He said that without his help or the help of an interpreter, he worries critical things might be missed. "I've actually witnessed my wife being questioned by healthcare professionals and giving incorrect answers when there's not a British Sign Language interpreter present. "This could lead to the wrong investigations taking place or a misdiagnosis." Polly Winn, from the RNID, says these concerns have real-life impacts, and it is far too common in Wales. "It's really hard to overstate the impact this has on deaf people," she said. "It is stripping them of their independence, privacy, and decency. "It is really dangerous because even if families have the best of intentions, they are not qualified to relay that information, so people are coming away from appointments confused and maybe missing out on really important treatment." The Welsh Government says it is "reviewing the standards across healthcare in Wales" and is "working with organisations such as RNID and the British Deaf Association".
