Video: Individuals can access assistive hearing device through crowdfunding opportunity
A Cambridge audio software company has launched a crowdfunding campaign in a bid to get its “breakthrough” hearing technology into the hands of those who struggle to hear in noisy environments.
The small team at AudioTelligence originally planned to work with one of the large hearing aid companies to bring its assistive listening technology to market. However,But the company says that it has been met with resistance, despite the trials of its Orsana prototype having led to many enquiries from individuals affected by the so-called ‘cocktail party problem’.
AudioTelligence has decided to go in alone with its mission to help people with the condition. The Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) states that nearly 80 per cent of people have left a restaurant, café, or pub early because of the noise in its ‘Speak Easy – Hearing the views of your customers’ report.
The crowdfunding goal is £400,000 to fund the manufacture of an initial batch of 1,000 Orsana tabletop devices with accompanying wireless earbuds.
Orsana is a small, lightweight device that uses built-in microphones and advanced algorithms to separate speech from noise.
The device is used by placing it on a table and clear speech will be delivered to the accompanying wireless earbuds. The device also mutes the user’s own voice to avoid any echo issues.
Supporters of the campaign will be rewarded with one of the first devices off the production line. The aim is then to scale up production quickly to meet the pent-up demand.
AudioTelligence CEO Sue Handley Jones said: “We have been inundated with enquiries from consumers and audiologists keen to know when our technology will be available.”
“So we have decided to take matters into our own hands and manufacture Orsana ourselves – funding the production through this crowdfunding campaign. Our unwavering belief in the tremendous benefits of our technology drives our passion to make it accessible to everyone who needs it.”
AudioTelligence says that Orsana uses a different approach from traditional hearing solutions, which use techniques such as beamforming and digital noise reduction, which it states are “imprecise and can distort voices and introduce unwanted noises”.
Orsana uses AudioTelligence’s patented blind source separation and noise suppression technologies, which it says ensures high performance and low latency of just 50ms to avoid ‘lip sync’ issues. In a typical café or restaurant setting, Orsana has been shown to increase speech understanding from five5 per cent to 98 per cent.
Details of the crowdfunding campaign can be found here.