AI-powered glasses could give hearing loss sufferers superpowers

Scientists have developed artificial intelligence-powered glasses that give users superhuman hearing.

Smart glasses equipped with a camera that translates lip movements into speech provide clear audio to people with hearing difficulties or anyone in noisy environments.

The glasses, developed by a team from Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh, Napier and Sterling, were trained on examples such as the sound of a washing machine and traffic noise.

Researchers hope the new smart glasses could help the more than 1.2 million adults in the UK who have hearing loss severe enough to make conversation difficult, according to data from the Royal National Institute for Deaf People.

"We're not trying to reinvent hearing aids. We're trying to give them superpowers," says Mathini Sellathurai of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

The user points the camera at or looks at the person they want to listen to. Even if two people are speaking at the same time, the AI uses visual cues to pick out the person's voice.

In this computationally intensive process, the voice data is sent to servers in Sweden. Despite the distance, the researchers claim that high-speed broadband, or 5G, makes this "feel instantaneous."

The technology is primarily aimed at supporting people with hearing aids and visual impairments, but is universal enough to be used by anyone working in noisy environments such as oil rigs or crowded venues.

“There are only a few large companies producing hearing aids, and they offer limited support for noisy environments,” says Professor Sellathurai.

We want to overcome this barrier and help more people, especially children and older adults, access affordable, AI-powered hearing support.

The researchers, who are currently in talks with hearing aid manufacturers, hope to have a working version of the glasses ready by 2026. They also plan to make the cloud-based system public so anyone with a compatible device can benefit from the technology.