The Next Sound You Hear

One of those talented types was Tim Trine. Ruzicka had been courting Trine for two years because of his hearing research at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “When I started in January of 1998, my team consisted of one other person,” Trine recalls. Since then, Trine’s team has grown to 42 staffers involved in hearing and hearing-aid research, including numerous mechanical and software engineers. At Starkey’s new research center in Berkeley, six full-time researchers focus on developing new ideas for the field without worrying about current capabilities. “The general notion,” Trine says, “is that eventually the hardware will get there.”

And in many cases, it has.

From PAs to Microprocessors

The hearing aid as we know it dates back to the 1950s, when transistors made it possible to power a current that could transmit sound. Essentially a small public-address system, a hearing aid amplifies sound that enters the device through a microphone, then delivers it via speaker into the ear. But early devices fell far short of the ear’s natural ability to automatically shift some sounds to the background while focusing in on others, and wearers would take them out or turn them off when too much sound overwhelmed their ears.

As transistors evolved into microchips, the advent of digital signal processing did for hearing aids what compact discs did for music. Sound encoded as 0s and 1s is processed according to pitch and volume, then separated into independently controlled bands and channels, to be interpreted and controlled with much more nuance by the microprocessor according to the wearer’s specific hearing loss and environment.

As a result, today’s top-line hearing aids are more like home theater systems, “with multi-speaker surround sound and Dolby noise reduction that you can tune to the dimensions of your room with a multi-band equalizer,” says Paul Dybala, president and editor-in-chief of Texas-based hearing-information portal Audiology Online. Starkey’s new Destiny hearing aid, for instance, uses algorithms in the software embedded in the hearing aid to automatically identify and separately process incoming sounds. If Destiny detects a lot of ambient noise, it will turn off microphones picking up background noise and turn on a directional microphone at the front of the hearing aid to focus on speech. Destiny also can electronically store all incoming sounds, so that a hearing aid fitter can download this information and track exactly how the device responds to these sounds, thus making more accurate adjustments.

None of these capabilities is new, Dybala notes; but Starkey has put some distinctive spins on them. For example, Starkey’s new fitting software for Destiny puts the patient in a virtual simulation of real-world environments, such as a restaurant, car, and home. In a restaurant, a mouse click can move the patient from one table to another and demonstrate how the hearing aid will adapt to different levels of conversation, background music, and clanking dishes.