The blurring of the lines between audio and health devices seems to be becoming a trend throughout the industry. “We really want to make sure we take care of our customers’ hearing,” says Mikka Tikander, head of audio at Helsinki-based Bang & Olufsen. Tickander points to recent data about declining hearing health in young adults and reports that there was a lot of emphasis from manufacturers on ANC and hearing health at AES’s headphone technology conference in Espoo, Finland, this August.
“Apple has a big lead in that area,” he says. “We want to make sure our headphones can adapt, choose [on when to block out sound] On your part, if you allow it, of course. Some people don’t like the idea, but if there is any noise around you, the headset can take care of it, just tune it a little and you will have normal hearing once you are away from that noise.
Enter “Sound Bubble”
Harvana AI is a startup that wants to go beyond the current noise cancellation and ambient noise features of the AirPods. Co-founded by Shyam Gollakota, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, and two of his students, Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen, Harvana recently raised $6 million in a pre-seed round, which included participation from none other than Amazon’s Alexa Fund.
One of the startup’s first big innovations was “Semantic Hearing,” which was the first project they approached about three years ago. The team created a hardware prototype – a pair of on-ear headphones with six microphones on the headband, connected to an Orange Pi microcontroller – to test a model that was trained to recognize 20 different types of ambient sounds. This included things like sirens, car horns, birdsong, crying babies, alarm clocks, pets, and people talking, and then allowed the user to isolate a person’s voice as a “spotlight” and block out all other frequencies.
“So I’m going to the beach and I just want to hear the sounds of the ocean, not people talking next to me, or I’m vacuum cleaning the house, but I still want to hear important sounds like people knocking on the door or a baby crying,” explains Gollakota, who lives in Seattle. “And that’s what we solved first. That was the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a door knocker. They sound very different, right?”
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