The Noise Challenge

So, yes, using only my high-end hearing aid and cochlear implant, I can hear my audiologist in the quiet of her office or my wife sitting across from me at the dinner table with little effort. But in the real world of crowded restaurants, busy airports, sports arenas, rush hour traffic, etc. I struggle mightily even with hearing assistive features like noise suppression, directional microphones, and a speech-to-text app designed with people like me in mind. 

At times, these technologies actually make things worse. For example, in a restaurant, the remote microphone may pick up and amplify fragments of conversations of strangers at adjoining tables and the speech-to-text app may convert them to text on my phone.  That leaves me with few options – leaving the conversation (where that’s practical) or turning down (or off) my hearing devices and focusing on my own private thoughts. Differentiating the signal from noise – what we want to hear from what we don’t – and reinforcing the former is clearly a huge technical challenge.  But I can’t think of anything that would make my life easier.