Deaf

We've already seen camera-equipped glasses that tell blind wearers what they're looking at. Well, Voicee is a bit different, in that it's a microphone-equipped set of glasses which display the text of what other people are saying.

Over the years, we've seen a number of experimental "smart" gloves that convert their deaf wearer's hand gestures into text. The aptly named Sign Language Translation Glove, however, is claimed to be the first mass-produced product to do so.

Although cochlear implants do allow some deaf people to hear again, adjusting the devices to individual users can be challenging. An experimental new implant is designed to help in that regard, by reading the user's brain waves.

For people who are deaf or hard of hearing, it can be difficult to pick out important sounds, such as a doorbell or a fire alarm. A new smartwatch system called SoundWatch identifies sounds and alerts users to them with a buzz and a visual readout.

A landmark study is offering evidence to suggest age-related hearing loss is primarily caused by accumulated damage to inner ear sensory hair cells, and hair-regeneration technologies may offer new treatments to restore hearing loss in old age.

We've covered a number of motion-tracking gloves designed to translate sign language into audible speech, and a team of bioengineers at UCLA has just come out with another design that's more compact and lightweight than any we've seen previously.

​Haptic signing is a process in which a hearing, sighted person conveys information to a deaf and blind individual by touching their back or other parts of their body. It's effective, but what happens if the deafblind person wants to be more independent? New haptic-feedback clothing could help.

​Amongst the challenges faced by the deaf is what's known as the "cocktail party effect," in which they have difficulty discerning one speaker's voice from others in crowded, noisy environments. A new device could help, however – by buzzing two of their fingers.

Hearing aids can have trouble separating a voice a listener wants to hear from all the background noise. Through a new form of artificial intelligence scientists believe they have come up with a solution that could be of huge benefit to those with hearing impairments.

Hyundai has developed technology to improve the driving experience for the deaf. The communication system converts sounds inside and outside of the car into tactile and visual aids.

​When trying to hear what another person is saying, hearing aid users are often stymied by loud background noises, such as the voices of other people in the same room. Scientists at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University are working on a solution, in the form of a "smart" camera-connected hearing aid.

While there are already speech-to-text apps that allow deaf users to read what other people are saying, they're often thwarted by background noise or multiple people speaking at once. SpeakSee, however, is a new multi-mic system that reportedly works much better.