The integration of health monitoring capabilities into audio devices is emerging as an industry trend.
Miikka Tikander, Head of Audio at Bang & Olufsen, noted a decline in hearing health among young adults and observed a focus on active noise cancellation (ANC) and hearing health by manufacturers at the AES’ Headphone Technology conference in Espoo, Finland, in August.
Tikander stated that Apple currently leads in this area. Bang & Olufsen aims to develop headphones capable of adapting to environments and automatically managing sound blocking, if enabled by the user. This functionality would allow a headset to mitigate noise in loud surroundings and return to normal listening conditions once the user departs the noisy environment.
Hearvana AI's Semantic Hearing Technology
Hearvana AI, a startup co-founded by University of Washington Professor Shyam Gollakota and students Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen, is developing advanced noise management solutions. The company recently secured $6 million in pre-seed funding, with Amazon’s Alexa Fund among the investors.
One of Hearvana AI's initial innovations is "semantic hearing," a project initiated approximately three years ago. The team developed a hardware prototype consisting of on-ear headphones equipped with six microphones on the headband, connected to an Orange Pi microcontroller. This system was designed to test a model trained to identify 20 distinct types of ambient sounds, including sirens, car horns, birdsong, crying babies, alarm clocks, pets, and human speech. The technology allows users to isolate specific sounds, such as an individual's voice, while filtering out other frequencies.
Gollakota explained potential applications, such as listening to ocean sounds at a beach without nearby conversations, or hearing important sounds like a door knock or a baby crying while operating a vacuum cleaner. The initial problem addressed was differentiating distinct sounds like a vacuum cleaner from a door knock.