Medical team transforms the iPhone into a hearing aid

[RaduTyrsina]

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After medical researchers have managed to turn an iPhone into a microscope, another team of scientists have managed to turn the seemingly all-purpose Apple smartphone into a hearing aid.

The team, working at the University of Essex, has created a special iPhone/iPod app that might prove to revolutionize the hearing aid equipment. Why is that? Because most hearing aids concentrate in amplifying the sound, but this particular app is much more advanced than that. The application has been dubbed BioAid and its most important feature is that it takes into account the inner biology of the human ear and its overall complexity. Th​​e app features 6 different settings that can be used by patients depending on their condition.

Professor Ray Meddis, in charge of the research, explains:

“Sounds are a complicated mixture of different frequencies and hearing loss is usually a loss of sensitivity to some but not all frequencies. Standard hearing aids amplify some frequencies more than others but BioAid is different because it also compresses the very loud sounds that can make social situations like going to the pub, cinema or a birthday party intolerable.”

BioMed features a microphone that picks up the noises from the environment, which are then sent for cataloguing into different frequency bands. Based on the patient’s condition, the bands are then recombined and mixed in order to provide the final frequency band that gets passed on in the ear plug.

But why choose the iPhone as a platform, one might wonder. Well, the medical team behind the invention seems to feel that mobile platforms overall are a great way to quickly bring the newly created hearing technology to the public.

Source: WSJ