SEATTLE – For as long as she can remember, Julie Anderson would tell people she had “ hearing problems”. The truth is, she did not actually know what the issue was, simply that when she heard certain noises she could not bear to be around them. Invariably it was something “normal” like the sound of someone clicking a pen top or slurping their food. When she heard those noises, she had to get away as quickly as possible or risk becoming seriously distressed . Ms Anderson, 52, from Hull, in north-east
England, now believes she is one of millions of people in
Britain and around the world who suffer from “misophonia”, a still not entirely understood sensory condition that makes ordinary sounds intolerable. One survey found almost 20 per of Britons may suffer from misophonia to some degree and yet there remains little help or support, or even public awareness. People are often met with doubt and scepticism, even from doctors. And because avoiding trigger noises invariably means avoiding other people, the condition can wreak havoc on relationships and work life. Now there is hope of a breakthrough that can offer real help beyond trying to block out noises with ear plugs , courtesy of researchers in the US. Scientists at the University of
Washington (UW) in Seattle have developed AI -assisted headphones that allow users to filter in real time the sounds they hear. In one example observed by i , a user set the headphones to block the sound of a noisy vacuum cleaner, but where they could still hear the knock on the door. In another, the sounds of traffic were blocked, but the user could still choose to hear the sound of birdsong. Misophonia support groups in America believe the headphones could be a breakthrough for dealing with the problem. They give the example of a person going to the cinema and someone behind them starting to eat a snack. Using an app on their phone, a user could block the eating noise through their headphones or ear buds, allowing them to stay and enjoy the film. Cris Edwards, founder of the group soQuiet , says of the technology: “If it works as they say it does this could be a miraculous assistive technology for people with misophonia.” The team of researchers at UW admit they were not thinking about such issues when they developed the system, which they call “semantic hearing”. For their work, they used recordings of dogs barking and roosters crowing. The AI technology used means the more data added to the system, the more effective it becomes. Shyam Gollakota , a professor of computer science and engineering at UW, says the system needed to do three things at once – identify all the sounds in any environment, separate the target sound, and preserve the direction from which the sound comes to ensure a listener can place it against others. To work in real time, it needed to happen with just a few milliseconds of audio so the user hears no delay. Read Next When you should start to worry about hearing loss, according to audiologists And the scientists needed to do it without the power of cloud computing that AI usually relies on, instead using just a mobile phone. “We designed the first real-time neural network that can extract these target sounds and run in real time on smartphones,” says Professor Gollakota. Since word of their research has emerged, the scientists have been contacted by many who work with misophonia, including Professor Zachary Rosenthal, of Duke University’s Centre for Misophonia and Emotion Regulation . Professor Gollakota and his young researchers, including PhD student Malek Itani, say they are excited to be working on something that could have real-world benefits. They are looking to develop a commercial version of their invention. “You’re talking about augmenting human auditory perception with AI,” says Professor Gollakota. Dr Jane Gregory of the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust is a leading expert on the condition in the
UK and suffers from it herself. She is the author of Sounds Like Misophonia: How to Stop Small Noises from Causing Extreme Reactions. Dr Gregory says the Seattle research could have great potential, as it is important to think about ways to help people with misophonia “participate more in life”. If the headphones could allow someone to sit and eat with their family and block out the noises that trigger them but retain the conversation and ambient noise, “that would be a game changer for a lot of people because suddenly they will be able to have that social experience of sitting and eating”, she said. For Julie Anderson, who has two children and two grandchildren and has long worked in the hospitality industry, the technology could drastically improve her life. She says that often the noise of someone rattling their change at the bar can be upsetting, and blocking it out with a simple tap on a phone would allow her to be engage more with the world. “I think it can be a life changer for a lot of people,” she said.