Chas Pavlovic on an Open Portable Platform for Heaing Aid Research

I think it is safe to say that none of the people reading this announcement have perfect hearing anymore. From the night of our first rock concert, it’s all downhill. But the world of hearing is changing, with over the counter technology aiming to improve access to hearing assistance to *everybody*. Android, Apple iOS, and Bose all have technology available today that modifies the acoustic signal to fit our ears. The world will sound better to all of us.

To help this transition, the NIH is sponsoring three hardware and three software projects to develop open-source hearing aid platforms for research. I think this is cool because it is an attempt to develop state-of-the-art hardware and software, endeavoring to give research groups the opportunity to test their ideas on state-of-the-art baseline systems. Commercial hearing aid developers keep their ideas locked, for competitive reasons, in proprietary closed systems, thus making it difficult to make comparisons. Having a good baseline, with known technology, will improve existing hearing-aid technology, and bring the same ideas to conventional audio devices, thus improving all of our audio experiences. Very good.

This Friday at the CCRMA Hearing Seminar, Chas Pavlovic will be talking about his team’s efforts to develop and open-source hearing aid platform. Many of these efforts were discussed at last week’s American Audiology Society meeting, and it will be good to hear an update on Chas’ work, as well as the work of others. Starting now, we have better options upon which to build our own ideas for improving everybody’s hearing.

Who: Chas Pavlovic (BatAndCat Corporation)
What: An Open Portable Platform for Hearing Aid Research
When: Friday, March 8th at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room, on the top floor of the Knoll at Stanford
Why: We can all improve our auditory experience

Bring your favorite ears, perfect or not, to CCRMA and we’ll talk about how they are going to get better.

- Malcolm


Open Portable Platform for Hearing Aid Research
Chas Pavlovic

I will report on our work in the context of a large NIH initiative to facilitate the translation of the advances in basic reserarch to hearing aid algorithms. The work of oother groups would also bebriefly summarised. Specifically, work on Master Hearing Aid Software (PIs: Volker Hohmann and Chas Pavlovic) done at University of Oldenburg, and HörTech in Oldenburg) and the Portable hearing aid hardware (PI: Chas Pavlovic, Bat&Cat, PaloAlto) will be reviwed. In addition other relevant areas we are addressing, such as hearing aid fitting, and interconnected devices will be discussed.

Dr. Chas Pavlovic has an extensive career in academia and industry, developing state of the art technology to help people hear the world better. This includes chairing the committee that wrote the ANSI standard for the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII), for both normal and hearing-impaired listeners, as well as numerous commercial efforts to develop modern hearing aid technology. Dr. Pavlovic served as senior VP in charge of research and development at GN ReSound, as well as CTO of Sound ID, both local companies working on improving hearing. He is now the founder of BatAndCat corporation, a three year old company dedicated to helping people with hearing loss. In particular, his company has been developing a family of attractive and affordable hearables that connect wirelessly with each other to help people hear and communicate better.