Aside from little ones trying to learn to read, write and speak, the hearing impaired have suffered because of the pandemic making face masks a common sight.
Most hearing impaired people — even if they use hearing aids — still read lips, which is obviously impossible with someone else’s mouth covered.
However, a team of researchers out of the University of Glasgow has created a next-generation hearing aid that not only uses AI to cut down on ambient noise that usually trips up the devices, but that also would be able to help someone read a person’s lips — even when their mouths are masked.
In the journal Nature Communications, the scientists detailed their breakthrough: They used wifi, radio frequency scanning technology to “teach” the device how to spot vowel sounds coming from test subjects’ faces — both when their faces were bare and when they were masked.
Coupled with “machine learning” that crunched samples of more than 3,500 examples, the device, which was coupled with a traditional but enhanced hearing aid, was able to translate what was being said under the mask’s fabric.
The breakthrough should be music to the ears of the 430 million people around the world who have hearing loss.