Designing a better hearing aid, four MEng students tackle a real-life challenge
Four MEng Acoustical Engineering final year students have embarked on a challenging but rewarding group project to build a new type of hearing aid – using Raspberry Pi computers.
Chris Barker, Yang Wang, Jalal Amine-Eddine and Sam Welch are building a powerful hearing aid based on the Raspberry Pi, a novel credit-card sized computer designed to allow simple access to computing on inexpensive hardware.
“We were interested in taking on this project as our prototype could help make a real difference for people with hearing problems in the future” explains Chris. “We are still in the early stages of our project but we are busy planning, exploring the Raspberry Pi’s audio capabilities and looking at how to use technical programming software such as MATLAB and Pure Data to make our aid work well by the April deadline.”
Their tutor, Associate Professor Dr Stefan Bleeck adds: “Hearing loss is a huge problem worldwide, costing billions of pounds every year in the UK alone. However technology has advanced massively in recent years and projects such as this could lead to the production of new aids that are much more powerful than currently available commercial devices, yet many times cheaper, customisable and easy to use. Looking ahead, the landscape for hearing aids and communication devices will change beyond recognition in the next 10 years, and we are driving this change at the University of Southampton to the benefit of the hard of hearing.”
All engineering students carry out a group project at the end of their time at the University of Southampton, working on a wide range of up to the minute topics from robotics to unmanned autonomous vehicles and racing cars. They put academic theory into practice and learn more about team working and project management, developing essential skills for the world of work in the process.