NIDCD R44DC014030 

​Technology to Support Deployment of Intelligent Audio Devices
Principal Investigator:
​ Caslav Pavlovic

This is a Fast Track SBIR Project currently in Phase III.  Its overall goal is to develop technologies and devices for better hearing which satisfy a number of criteria that collectively reduce both hearing health disparities as well as principal deterrents to the acceptance of hearing aids.  These include high cost of hearing aids, stigma, cultural resentment of the amplification, complex access to professional medical care, low perceived benefit of hearing aids, etc.
The technology that is being developed in this study will enable full commercialization in Phase III of a battery of new wearable audio devices that can either act on their own as personal listening devices, or for superior performance, interconnect to each other as a “smart swarm,” coordinating and sharing signal and noise information among themselves and with a plethora of smart objects in the environment.  

OPEN PLATFORM MASTER COMMUNICATION DEVICE GRANT CLUSTER

PARTNERS:
​BatAndCat SoundLabs
Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg HoerTech gGmbH

1. NIDCD R01DC015429
​Open Community Platform for Hearing Aid Reserach
Principal Investigators: 
​Volker Hohmann and
​Caslav Pavlovic

2. NIDCD R44DC016257
Portable Hearing Laboratory
Principal Investigator:
​Caslav Pavlovic

There are two grants in this cluster: the five year R01 focusing on software and the four year Phase II SBIR focusing on hardware.The overarching goal is to provide a large group of researchers (”Community”) with the means to efficiently develop and evaluate, in collaborative multi-center environments, novel signal processing schemes, individualized fitting procedures, and technical solutions and services for hearing devices such as hearing aids and assistive listening devices.  In R01DC015429 our emphases is on developing open source code for real-time runtime environments for standard PC platforms with standard sound hardware (Windows and Linux operating systems) as well as for ARM platforms.    
The purpose of R44DC014030 is to develop a portable, rigid, versatile and wearable platform featuring an ARM processor and able to run software developed in the R01DC015429.  This Portable Hearing Laboratory (PHL) consists of both hardware elements to provide the advanced desired functionality and software routines to provide the basic intra-device data flow as well as interconnectivity with other devices such as telephones and remote microphones.  
What this projects brings  is the only platform that is not only portable physically, but provides for all the features that researchers may need to empower or even conceive new algorithms.

NIDCD R43DC016251 

​User-driven fitting of hearing aids and other assistive hearing devices 

Principal Investigators: 
​S.R. Prakash (Caraway Software) and
​Caslav Pavlovic (BatAndCat Corporation)

This is a Phase I SBIR.     A hearing aid user is often dissatisfied with the sound quality of their device, despite its sophistication and adjustment by a trained audiologist. The problem can be mitigated by learning the user fine-tune the device for maximum comfort in everyday use. We will apply modern machine learning methods to develop a program for efficient user-driven fitting of hearing assistive devices.
​FCOI Policy