In a 2018 Accenture Digital Health report, 75 percent of respondents said technology played an essential role in managing their health. When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) powered digital health and wearable devices, 72 percent said they’re willing to share their wearable data with their health insurance plan. The report also found that when AI and robotics consumer interest surpassed the choices available today for virtual care.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020 in Las Vegas, January 7-10, 2020, AI-powered digital health devices will be prevalent. For people with hearing loss or who are visually impaired, machine learning in digital health devices can open new possibilities to hear conversations more clearly or see the world around them.
AI and Vision:
Envision is a prototype that works with smartphones and smart glasses such as Google Glass. It is designed to turn a user’s smartphone camera into an extra set of eyes, speaking the visual information in front of the user.
AI and Hearing
Bruce Sharpe, Founder and CEO of Singular Hearing said that more than 466 million people worldwide are affected by some degree of hearing loss.
“This staggering number is rapidly increasing. Modern hearing aids are miracles of miniaturization, customizability and flexibility. It’s not their fault that noise has continued to be a problem,” said Sharpe. “Even powerful desktop computers were not good at handling noise. That is, until the last few years when good machine learning approaches came along.
Now we finally have new, more effective solutions for noise, thanks to the perfect storm of new machine learning algorithms, the availability of better data sets, powerful GPUs for training, and smartphones in everyone’s pocket that are capable of running the results,” added Sharpe.
The Canadian startup’s new product, HeardThat, is an app that uses AI to tune out background noise, which enables users with hearing loss to hear speech more clearly.
Sharpe says that other hearing assistance solutions are either devices like earbuds, which are inevitably under-powered, or phone apps that are using traditional technologies that have not been up to the task.
Also Read: Nudge Health App