Technology

Geek Alert: How Knowles Electronics Makes Hearing-Aid Microphones Smaller and Smarter

I’ve always been amazed by the directional microphones in my hearing aids. They are super-sensitive, they can be adjusted to catch noise either 360 degrees or just from the person speaking to me, and they are smaller than your fingernail. The technology that has to go into such finely tuned instruments is amazing, and I recently came across a good video of Daniel Warren, director of research for Knowles Electronics, that gives a flavor of the rocket science behind them. (It’s a promotional video for Wolfram Research, known for the Mathematica software tools used by engineers and, more recently, for the revolutionary computational search engine, Wolfram Alpha, developed over the past decade by computer science genius Steve Wolfram). The video is also a good example of the pains engineers have to go through to explain in layman’s terms how their inventions work and why they are so important. My rule of thumb is, even if I can’t understand half of what they say, if the product works, I will use it.

Gennum Abandons Hearing-Aid Market With DSP Chip and Headset Spinoffs

Gennum Corp. of Canada, long one of the leading suppliers of digital signal processing (DSP) chips and other technologies to the hearing-aid and headset industries, is abandoning the hearing-aid market with the spinout of its hearing instrument design and manufacturing operations to a private equity group and the sale of its consumer Bluetooth headset business to a consumer electronics company based in Sweden. The Gores Group, LLC, a Southern California-based private equity fund, has purchased the hearing-aid chip business and is backing a management spinout that will be named Sound Design Technologies Ltd. And CellPoint Connect AB, manufacturer of the Flamingo Bluetooth, has acquired the Gennum nXZEN and nX6000 Bluetooth headsets that have won acclaim for their sophisticated DSP-based noise-cancellation technology. Gennum’s retreat from the hearing-aid business isn’t necessarily bad news for hearing-aid manufactrers depending on its DSP chips, because the equity firm is backing a group of managers already running Gennum’s Sound Design hearing-aid business and presumably will help them more sharply focus on hearing-industry customer needs in addition to providing investment capital to further develop their technology.

Gennum’s DSP chips are digital engines for hearing aids. For manufacturers more interested in integrating standard technologies to deliver hearing-aid solutions to customers rather than designing their digital products from the ground up, Gennum and other chip companies such as AMI Semiconductors provide robust DSP platforms. It’s an open question whether the hearing-aid industry will trend toward a more horizontal structure, with component and software suppliers providing system elements that integrators will put together and market, much as personal computer manufacturers such as Dell and HP depend on chiips from Intel and operating system software from Microsoft. About a year ago, U.S. leaders Starkey spun off its chip development operation to AMI. If the trend continues, companies such as AMI and especially the new Sound Design, which wiil be focused exclusively on the hearing-assistance industry, will provide new hearing-aid designers with the components they need to get into the market quickly and cost effectively. That is the kind of competition that tends to increase product availability and lower costs to consumers — something that’s long-overdue in the hearing-aid industry.

Meanwhile CellPoint will use Gennum’s excellent Bluetooth technology to improve its position in the fiercely competitive market for consumer Bluetooth headsets for mobile phones. It is a great example of advanced DSP technology originally developed for hearing aids working its way into consumer products, providing better sound clarity and amplification to a market where aging ears and a need for smaller, more portable products is creating a demand for better call quality. Not addressed in the Bluetooth announcement is the fate of Gennum’s Hearphone earpiece which amplifies environmental sound and original ZEN headset which was its first Bluetooth entry. However, financial filings by Gennum in the past year indicate a desire by the company to move beyond these businesses, so I won’t hold my breath to see much marketing oomph behind them from Gennum going forward.

The acquisition and establishment of the new Sound Design company won’t formally close until sometime in October, so we won’t hear until then about details on the company’s product and market plans.

Agilent Makes It Easy To Design Hearing-Aid Compatible Cell Phones

Now there’s no excuse. Agilent Technologies has come up with a design system enabling manufacturers of mobile phones to easily ensure their handsets meet all the hearing-aid-compatibility (HAC) standards mandated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The news release and associated product material on the new Antenna Modeling Design System (AMDS) are worth looking at because they give a tutorial on electro-magnetic radition and the shielding technology required to assure your hearing aids are actually able to hear the sounds coming out of your cell phone. “By February 2008, all wireless carriers in the U.S. must ensure that 50 percent of their phones are hearing-aid compatible,” says Agilent Product Marketing Manager Erwin De Baetselier. “Today, we are leading the industry by offering HAC compatibility tests in our EM simulation environment, ensuring that designers of wireless devices will be able to meet these important and rigorous specifications.” I’ve written before about the foot-dragging by mobile phone manfacturers unwilling to put the extra effort into designing hearing-aid-compatible phones, and it’s good to see a leading supplier of components and design services taking the FCC mandate seriously.

Future Cochlear Implant Patients Might Preserve Some Residual Hearing

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new, less-invasive means of implanting electrodes into the cochlea that may ultimately do less damage to hearing nerves in the cochlea and preserve more residual hearing in the patient.

The new electrode is thinner and can be inserted with a new device that enables doctors to monitor their progress and avoid doing the kind of damage that currently results in most implant patients losing most or all of what is left of their natural hearing. Because cochlear implants directly stimulate the auditory nerve they are able to bypass the hairlike cilia hearing cells that line the cochlea. And because it is designed to go deeper into the cochlea, it may provide more stimulation of low-frequency sounds, which could significantly improve the hearing of implantees. The new electrode is being tested on animals and would not be available for human patients for at least four years. But when it arrives, because it is made with the same materials used to make semiconductor chips, it will bring implant patients one step closer to true “Bionic Man” status that Michael Chorost has written about in Rebuilt.

Digital Clarity Power From Clarity Products Is Chock-Full Of Digital Signal Processing Performance

Several weeks ago I complained that Clarity Products hadn’t adequately explained the enhanced Digital Clarity Power (DCP) technology it was promoting as the latest and greatest innovation for its cordless and amplified telephones. Clarity was quick to answer my questions with comments on the blog post. And now on their website they’ve unveiled the technical background information they promised. DCP uses a digital signal processing chip and sophisticated algorithms borrowed similar to those found in hearing aids to improve the performance of its amplified phones.

DCP has three main features: Multiband Compression, Acoustic Echo Cancellation and Noise Reduction. Multiband compression uses proprietary algorithms to determine what incoming sound is the human voice, then provides more amplification to the voice signals while suppressing other sounds. Acoustic echo cancellation elminates the feedback that happens when amplified signals from the speaker are picked up by the microphone. And noise reduction reduces the hiss, static and background noise found on many connections, which amplified phones often exacerbate. The technology is featured in the company’s new amplified Clarity Professional C2210 corded desktop phone and in its new amplified cordless portable phone, the Clarity Professional 4205. Other than the new cordless and corded amplified phones from ClearSounds, I haven’t seen any other manufacturers delivering such advanced technology in full-featured office phones for hard-of-hearing consumers. In addition to its updated website, Clarity Products has been turning on the public relations machine. This past week, BusinessWeek magazine featured the Plantronics subsidiary and its new DCP technology in a major feature article.

California Dreaming About Hearing-Hair Replacement

Let’s talk hair-replacement therapy. No, I’m not talking about premature baldness, Rogaine or Hair Club for Men. I’m talking about the 15,000 hair-like cells we have in each cochlea at birth that are responsible for translating sound waves from the ear drum into electrical signals the brain can decode as speech, music, a baby crying and all other sounds. When these cells die due to natural aging processes, trauma, or exposure to too much noise or otoxic drugs, we experience sensorineurial hearing loss, the most common form of hearing impairment.

Human cochlear hair cells don’t regenerate, but a few years ago scientists discovered that they do in birds. Now stem-cell gene researchers are looking for ways to make the hair grow back in humans, too, which could be a potent cure for the most common form of hearing loss. Last year, California voters approved $3 billion in funding for stem-cell research, bucking the President’s go-slow approach and instantly making their state a magnet for the world’s best stem-cell researchers. This week, Stanford University scored a huge recruiting coup when it stole from Harvard Dr. Stefan Heller, a world-leading researcher investigating stem-cell enabled regeneration of “hearing hair.”

Heller, PhD and associate professor of otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School, will join the Stanford Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Heller made headlines the year before last when he published research on an experiment successfully transplanting embryonic hair cells from a mouse into a live chicken embryo, which started growing both chicken and mouse cochlear hair cells. So we should keep an eye on the Golden State for further developments. Heller says a cure for human hearing loss is many years away, but he gives us all some room for hope in an article he wrote last winter for Hearing Health magazine: “With patience and determination, I hope to reach my personal goal, which is to witness a reliable and safe cure for hearing loss during my lifetime.”

ScanSoft: Will Speech Processing Go The Way Of The Kurzweil Reader?

I frequently entertain myself with a futuristic vision of high-tech eyeglasses equipped with a tiny microphone, a tiny speech processing chip, and a tiny holographic projector that can transcribe everyday conversation in real time and project it in front of my eyes like the closed-captioning system on my TV. Believe it or not, all the technologies required to create such a product are known — it will only take another 10 or 15 (okay, maybe 20) years of development before we see such a device. Ray Kurzweil, the irrepressible inventor and serial entrepreneur, had a similar vision more than 20 years ago of a digital Reading Machine that would scan written words and speak them in real time, so that blind people could read normal text again. The good news: Kurzweil invented the technology and sold it to Xerox. The bad news: Xerox used the technology instead for more lucrative business applications and put the product for the blind on the back shelf.

Now something similar may be happening in the market for speech-to-text processing products. This week’s announcement of yet another acquisition by ScanSoft, the speech processing industry giant, indicates there are healthy markets for speech processing applications. Scansoft agreed to acquire Nuance Communications for $221 million, the latest in a string of speech recognition companies it has acquired over the past several years including Dragon, SpeechWorks and Lernout & Hauspie. But with consolidation of so much of the industry’s expertise in a single company, will development of products for niche disability markets take a back seat to more commercial products with wider appeal? Will it put my futuristic eyeglasses with real-time personal captioning on the back burner? Let’s see what happened to Ray Kurzweil and his Reading Machine for the blind.

Frustrated that his invention wasn’t used for the purpose he originally envisioned, Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Educational Systems in 1996 and developed a new and even better print-to-speech reader for the blind. According to an interesting profile in Fortune FSB this month, the company is fulfilling its promise, closing in on $15 million in sales of its reader that includes a scanner and software for personal computers. It is doing well by doing good, making a huge difference in the lives of the blind people it serves. That’s the good news.

At the same time he was building a better reader for the blind, Kurzweil had another company, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, that was building the first commercial large-vocabulary speech recognition system, the Kurzweil Voice Report. In 1997 he sold the company to Lernout & Hauspie, a hot dot-com-era company committed to making voice recognition as common as the TV remote. But now the bad news. When the dot-com bubble went bust, so did L&H, which filed for bankruptcy. ScanSoft acquired the company’s assets at a fire-sale price and announced it would use the voice recognition technology originally developed by Kurzweil to add dictation capability to its office automation products. Alas, no mention of my futuristic eyeglasses or any other helpful consumer products for the hearing impaired.

But now we end on the good news again: Kurzweil has announced that with the success of the new Kurzweil Educational Systems reader for the blind, he will turn his amazing inventive mind to other products for the disabled — you guessed it — captioning systems for the hearing impaired. According to FSB, “By 2010, he envisions pocket-sized reading machines as well as tiny gadgets that will translate spoken words to text for the hearing impaired — essentially providing subtitiles for the world.” You can bet that if Kurzweil gets a hand-held real-time captioning system to market by 2010, he won’t be able to resist the challenge of coming up with ever smaller and better versions until he can integrate it right into my eyeglasses as well. So there may be a happy ending yet.

Let’s not get our hopes up right away. Remember, Alexander Graham Bell decided to invent the telephone because he wanted to use technology to help his hearing-impaired mother hear better. Bell’s invention created a multi-billion global industry and made him rich. But what about his mom? What modern device still gives more fits than any other to hard-of-hearing people? What device that is an absolute necessity for success in our global information society constantly fails to measure up to the needs of hearing-impaired people for good amplification and signal clarity? That’s right: the telephone. Sorry, Mom. But Alexander Graham Bell continued as a tireless hearing advocate throughout his life, using profits from his invention to set up schools, libraries and associations for the deaf. And Ray Kurzweil has already shown he’ll be just as dogged in pursuing his own visions. When he insisted that his Reading Machine for the blind actually should get into the hands of blind people, Kurzweil defied commercial logic and convention, not to mention a big, powerful company like Xerox. I’m betting he’ll do it again with products for the deaf and hard of hearing.