A team at the UCL Ear Institute led by Professor Nicholas Lesica has been awarded £1m from the Medical Research Council’s Developmental Pathway Funding Scheme (DPFS) for their work on novel AI-based hearing technology.
"Current hearing aids make sounds louder, but they don’t do anything to address the more complex effects of hearing loss,” said Professor Lesica. “This is why millions of people still struggle with the things that matter most to them, like understanding speech in noisy restaurants or enjoying a concert. Our approach is different because it goes straight to the fundamental problem."
The award will provide continued support for a line of work that began with the development of novel methods for recording brain activity and has recently led to the release of an AI model of the auditory brain.
“The problems with hearing aids have been obvious for years, but we didn’t have the tools to do anything about them. Now we finally do," said Professor Lesica.
The team’s approach is focused on the “neural code”, the patterns of brain activity that carry information about sound. Professor Lesica explained: “If all that hearing loss did was reduce brain activity, then current hearing aids would be fine. But we know it’s not that simple. When the ear is damaged, the signals that it sends to the brain are profoundly distorted. Just turning up the volume isn’t going to change that.”
The key idea is that the ideal hearing aid should process a sound so that it causes the same pattern of activity in the brain of someone with hearing loss as the original sound would have caused in the brain of someone with normal hearing.
“It’s a simple enough concept, but it’s a lot easier said than done. We don’t know enough about hearing loss to design the right sound processing ourselves. That’s why the sound processing in current hearing aids is still the same as it was 20 years ago. But now we have the tools we need to let the AI learn the right processing from examples of brain activity with and without hearing loss,” said Professor Lesica.
The technology is being developed in partnership with Perceptual Technologies, a startup co-founded by Professor Lesica and Dr Andreas Fragner. "We are incredibly grateful to the MRC for this significant support," said Dr Fragner. "This funding will provide the resources that we need to take the breakthroughs from the lab and turn them into transformative products."
The team hopes to leverage their success with hearing aids toward similar advances in other brain technologies. “Cochlear implants would be a natural next step,” said Dr Fragner. “But it’s also easy to imagine other applications where having AI in the loop between sensory inputs and brain activity could make a big difference.”
About Perceptual Technologies
Perceptual Technologies Ltd. is leveraging neuroscience-based AI to restore natural hearing. For commercial or investment inquiries, please contact andreas.fragner@perceptualhq.com.