MIT engineers working on a new type of hearing aid

Findings from MIT scientists could lead to hearing aids that mimic the ear’s ability to focus on particular frequencies.

“We’ve incorporated into hearing aids everything we know about how sounds are sorted, but they’re still not very effective in problematic environments such as restaurants, or anywhere there are competing speakers,” says Dennis Freeman, MIT professor of electrical engineering, who is leading the research team. “If we knew how the ear sorts sounds, we could build an apparatus that sorts them the same way.”

In a 2007 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, Freeman and his associates A.J. Aranyosi and lead author Roozbeh Ghaffari showed that the tiny, gel-like tectorial membrane, located in the inner ear, coordinates with the basilar membrane to fine-tune the ear’s ability to distinguish sounds. Last month, they reported in Nature Communications that a mutation in one of the proteins of the tectorial membrane interferes with that process.

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