Computer Science Associate Professor Octav Chipara and Assistant Professor Tianbao Yang and the UI Hearing Aid and Aging Research Laboratory (HAAR)'s Dr. Yu-Hsiang Wu were recently awarded an NSF Grant entitled "A Framework for Optimizing Hearing Aids In Situ Based on Patient Feedback, Auditory Context, and Audiologist Input." As part of this project, computer scientists, engineers, and audiologists will develop new methods for overcoming fundamental limitation of existing methods for tuning hearing aids (HAs) that they are not tailored to individual needs.
The project includes development of two systems for optimizing the configuration of HAs:
- improve how feedback is obtained from patients, combined with auditory context information, and translated into configuration adjustments
- automatically adapt configuration without requiring an audiologist to perform adjustments
Additionally, the research will "advance the state-of-the-art in embedded systems by developing techniques to run HA optimization algorithms as part of a multi-tier system composed of HAs, mobile phones, and cloud services."
This three-year project, which has been awarded $701,956, is excepted to "empower patients to become more involved in their hearing care, improve HA satisfaction, and enrich their social interactions."
UI unabridged award abstract may be found here. Collaborative award with UCSD is available here.