Scientists have developed a pair of glasses powered by artificial intelligence that give wearers superhuman hearing.
Equipped with a camera to translate lip movements into speech, the smart spectacles deliver cleaned up audio for people with hearing difficulties – or anyone in a noisy environment.
The glasses – built by a team from Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh, Napier and Sterling – were trained on noise samples including washing machines and traffic.
The researchers hope the new smart glasses can 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,” said Mathini Sellathurai from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
“You simply point the camera or look at the person you want to hear. Even if two people are talking at once, the AI uses visual cues to extract the voice of the person you’re looking at.”
The process requires a lot of computer processing, with the sound data sent to servers in Sweden. Despite the distance, the researchers claim that high-speed broadband or 5G make it “feel instant”.
The technology is primarily aimed to support people who use hearing aids and have visual impairments, however it is general enough to be used by anyone working in noisy places like oil rigs or busy venues.
“There are only a few big companies that make hearing aids, and they have limited support in noisy environments,” said Professor Sellathurai.
“We want to break that barrier and help more people, especially children and older adults, access affordable, AI-driven hearing support.”
The researchers are already in talks with hearing aid manufacturers and hope to have a working version of the glasses ready by 2026.
They also plan to make the cloud-based model public to allow anyone with a compatible device to benefit from the technology.
