keenan: has bionic hearing arrived?

as a teenager, i loved the six million dollar man on tv. while other superheroes had weird backstories like coming from the planet krypton, fictional nasa test pilot steve austin had a totally scientific explanation for his superpowers. he was nearly killed in a plane crash and rebuilt with nuclear-powered super limbs and bionic implants, at a cost of $6 million in 1970’s dollars.now, 50 years later, we’re seeing some of those advances show up in real life, with amazing prosthetic limbs and direct brain implants. of course, we’re still waiting for miracles like one in which austin’s love interest dies and is brought back to life from a frozen state, becoming the bionic woman.one thing that wasn’t really contemplated by the old tv scriptwriters was the advent of artificial intelligence (ai), and machine learning (ml). could science plus cheap computing power plus ai turn us all into some kind of steve austin?bruce sharpe, ceo of surrey, b.c.-based singular hearing certainly thinks so. his plucky little company has gone to the consumer electronic show for two years now with an ml-based smartphone app called heardthat. on the company’s website, they say they “use ai to separate speech from noise.”sharpe is well aware that hearing assistance is a huge business with sophisticated global players like phonak, starkey and oticon. their hearing aids range from hundreds to thousands of dollars. i use a pair myself, and they are a godsend when i’m speaking in a crowded room and there’s a question from the back row.one reason i get such good results from my hearing aids is that i spent time with a trained audiologist, setting them up for the various environments i’m likely to encounter. of course, you can’t predict every kind of noise that might cross your path. i once taught a computer programming course in a washing machine factory. like clockwork, a machine dropped off the assembly line every 35 seconds with a resounding thud. since that’s unlikely to happen again, my hearing aids don’t know about that scenario.in canada, you need at least a master’s degree to practise as an audiologist. what if you could pack that expert into your pocket, or more specifically your smartphone? that’s the idea behind the heardthat app. sharpe explains that manually setting up hearing aids “is a sophisticated process but ultimately it is a hand-crafted setup that depends heavily on the skill of the audiologist and not on any intelligence in the hearing aids.”the heardthat app uses what sharpe calls “unique noise separation algorithms based on machine learning to provide a more effective solution for noise.”why can’t hearing aid manufacturers just do the same thing? sharpe gives two reasons for his company’s advantage. they looked at publicly available data and then did substantial original research on sorting out good sounds from noise. also, there are physical limitations to hearing aids. you wouldn’t want an 8 cm x 16 cm object weighing 164 grams hanging from your ear. but those are exactly the specs of the smartphone i used to test the app. the “magic”, as sharpe calls it, is how they combine the substantial computing power of your smartphone with their sound-processing algorithms.one key advantage is that the app can send its output to many devices. sure, it will communicate with your hearing aids, but it can also send audio to regular earbuds. that could be a very important feature in getting guys to use this technology, addressing the stigma about hearing aids making you look like an old fogey. with the rise of video calling and hands free telephony, it’s not unusual to see people wearing earbuds, and nobody needs to know what they’re playing.the research on hearing aid adoption doesn’t show significant gender differences, but one glaring number popped out in a study of u.s. adults. the average time between becoming a candidate for a hearing aid, and actually getting one, was 8.9 years. that’s unfortunate because those people are missing out on an important aspect of life.it’s not just old folks, either. according to the world health organization, “1.1 billion young people (aged between 12–35 years) are at risk of hearing loss due to exposure to noise in recreational settings.” ironically, the earbuds that ruined your hearing with loud music might play a role in restoring it.will the heardthat app work for you? it’s pretty easy to find out. it’s free to download for iphone and android phones, and easy to set up. the company plans to have a free version for occasional users, though they will eventually charge for heavy use, probably $10 a month. all the processing is done on your phone, so there’s no chance of somebody breaking into a cloud service and eavesdropping on you.i can’t remember if steve austin had bionic hearing powers, but i hear there’s a six billion dollar man movie in the works, starring mark wahlberg. i’m willing to bet that he will have ai-assisted hearing built into his bionic chassis.dr. tom keenan is an award-winning journalist, public speaker, professor in the school of architecture, planning and landscape at the university of calgary, and author of the best-selling book, technocreep: the surrender of privacy and the capitalization of intimacy.