All posts tagged: Braincontrolled

A brain-controlled system may help listeners with hearing loss cut through the noise : NPR

A brain-controlled system may help listeners with hearing loss cut through the noise : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

Scientists say they’ve developed brain-decoding technology that could help people who use hearing assistance devices pick out one voice in a crowded room — a longstanding challenge for hearing aids. Matteo Farinella/Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute hide caption toggle caption Matteo Farinella/Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute Imagine a crowded room. It’s a chaos of sound, teeming with indistinct voices. Scientists call this the cocktail party problem. To overcome it, most people are able to focus on a single speaker’s voice, which cues the brain to amplify that sound and turn down the rest. For people who use hearing aids, though, that process becomes a lot harder. Now, in the journal Nature Neuroscience, a team describes a solution that decodes a person’s brain waves to choose which voice their hearing system will amplify. It amounts to a “brain-controlled hearing aid,” says Nima Mesgarani, an author of the paper and an associate professor at Columbia University who runs the school’s Neural Acoustic Processing Lab. The new approach could lead to better hearing technology, including hearing aids, assistive listening devices …

Brain-controlled hearing system helps listeners pick out one voice in a crowd

Brain-controlled hearing system helps listeners pick out one voice in a crowd

Published by Jenni Sidey

In a crowded room, the problem is rarely volume. It is selection. Most hearing aids can make speech louder and soften certain background sounds, but they still struggle with the part human brains usually handle on their own, picking one voice out of many. That gap has long made noisy restaurants, family gatherings and busy workplaces especially hard for people with hearing loss. Now researchers at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute say they have taken an early but important step toward closing it. In a study published in Nature Neuroscience, the team showed for the first time in human experiments that a brain-controlled hearing system can help listeners focus on one conversation while suppressing another in real time. Instead of simply amplifying everything that reaches a microphone, the system reads patterns in brain activity linked to attention and uses them to boost the speech a person is trying to follow. “We have developed a system that acts as a neural extension of the user, leveraging the brain’s natural ability to filter through all the sounds in …

Brain-controlled assistive robots work best when they share the workload with users

Brain-controlled assistive robots work best when they share the workload with users

Published by José Betancourt

A new study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience suggests that assistive robots may work best when they share control with their users, striking a middle-ground between full automation and manual operation. For people living with severe motor impairments such as from the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), everyday tasks like cooking, eating, or moving objects often require constant assistance from caregivers. While physically assistive robots have the potential to restore independence, many existing systems are limited to simple, pre-programmed tasks. Brain-robot interfaces, which allow users to control robots using brain signals, offer a promising alternative—but they are often noisy, slow, and difficult to use without help from the robot itself. Led by Hannah Douglas, researchers at Araya Inc. in Tokyo set out to design a system that could overcome these challenges. Their goal was to create a shared realistic virtual kitchen environment where two users could work alongside two mobile robots to complete tasks. The users would use a combination of brain signals via electroencephalography (EEG), muscle signals via electromyography (EMG), and eye-tracking to …