Outstanding in Lower Saxony: the Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all is to receive millions in funding from the state to open up further fields of research and increase its chances in the follow-up programme to the Excellence Initiative. The new findings could have a lasting impact on our daily lives.
It is an ambitious goal: hearing for all. It gave the Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all, in which scientists from Oldenburg and Hanover pool their expertise, its name. It describes the vision of the future that drives them - even beyond the cluster's term until the end of 2017. The hearing researchers can now draw on funding from the state in order to move a step closer to this vision in new fields of research: Their success in the "Cutting-Edge Research in Lower Saxony" competition will provide them with one million euros over the next two years, which should also increase their chances in the Excellence Initiative's successor programme.
"In a world where almost a fifth of the population suffers from hearing loss, hearing research is essential both medically and socially," emphasises Oldenburg University President Prof. Dr Dr Hans Michael Piper. "With the support now granted by the state, we will continue to intensively pursue the ambitious goal of hearing for all in the coming years."
The new two-year research network, appropriately named "Hearing for All", aims to build bridges from targeted hearing research to sustainable impact on everyday life. "We want to interlink both the latest diagnostic methods and different types of hearing aids even more closely," says Oldenburg hearing researcher Prof Dr Dr Birger Kollmeier, who heads the cluster of excellence and is also coordinating the new network. The hearing researchers are focussing on three important and forward-looking challenges.
The first goal is audiological precision medicine, with hearing diagnostics that are much more precisely tailored to individual needs when fitting hearing aids. "We will include genetic aspects as well as the question of the exact structure of the hearing system. We want to combine both with data from diagnostics, with everything we know about individual patients," explains Kollmeier. This should provide an even more complex picture of patients with hearing loss - with new insights into its causes and their interrelationships. On the basis of this immense database, computer models will then help to reliably predict the plausibility of diagnoses and the success of treatment options.
Secondly, under the heading "Hearing assistance and speech", the scientists are endeavouring to establish natural speech in a natural environment as a new benchmark in hearing research and thus enable better processing. "Hearing aids need to be more speech-sensitive," says Kollmeier. Up to now, their signal processing has often been based on physically familiar signals such as tones and noises, while the special features of speech have been neglected - as has the speech context. At the moment, the devices record what is heard in units of 100 milliseconds, while the brain understands it in longer contexts: "We adapt to a speaker in the entirety of speech comprehension, learn to recognise accent and expression, for example - we want to teach hearing aids more about this."
The third pillar, "Hearing aids and the brain", is intended to pave the way for comprehensive hearing support for all patients in all situations. Scalable, universal hearing aids should cover the range from acoustic "transparency" for people with normal hearing to full hearing support for the severely hearing-impaired. One of the aims is to develop multifunctional, biohybrid implants that can interpret signals from the brain and prevent unwanted tissue reactions after implantation, for example by means of a cell coating. The latest findings in neuropsychology and technology are also incorporated when it comes to the vision of a "cognitive hearing aid". According to Kollmeier, this could, for example, repeat what was previously heard or present speech more slowly "to help not only with hearing, but also with understanding".
The Hearing4all cluster of excellence - funded by the federal and state governments since 2012 - is one of the world's leading centres of hearing research. In addition to the University of Oldenburg, the University of Hanover and Hanover Medical School are also involved. The cluster covers the entire development chain from the laboratory to the clinic, bridging the gap between basic research and industrial application.