Dunshaw Hearing Aid Centers

Hearing aids are a big part of the fight against hearing loss, but are only one part of the solution. Audiologists not only diagnose hearing loss and fit their patients with proper hearing aids, they also suggest lifestyle changes that can engender better communication – not just an ability to hear quieter sounds.

Common tips include focusing on one person at a time, choosing areas where background noise is minimized, and focusing on face of the person to whom you’re talking. The last tip is especially important for those skilled in reading lips.

The number of skilled lip-readers might soon be growing, thanks to research out of the eighth International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing. A study presented at the conference found that for the first time ever, computers are able to read lips better than their human counterparts. The computers were able to do so well by exploiting small but simple differences in images lip shapes, rather than the more complex full-video required by human lip-readers.

This technology has been used in a new series of videos to that were able to teach humans to read lips for one-syllable words: no easy task.

The study’s lead author, Sarah Hilder said, “With just four hours of training it helped them improve their lip-reading skills markedly. We hope this research will represent a real technological advance for the deaf community.”

Hopefully, this new lip-reading technology can seamlessly combine with the ever-changing hearing-aid technology to foster better, easier communication for the 36 million Americans suffering from hearing loss.

Tags: computer lip-readers, hearing aids, hearing technology, innovative technology, Technology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 2:05 pm and is filed under News, Technology, hearing aid technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.