Hearing Aid Technology and Flies

You just never know where inspiration is going to come from. As researchers work on new medical innovations, they incorporate concepts from many different fields along with their own ideas and sparks of creativity. For example, consider the new role model for enhanced directional hearing: the ormia ochracea, a tiny yellow fly.

Directional Hearing and Hearing Aids

Directional hearing is the ability to recognize and focus on sounds coming from a particular direction. It is a beneficial skill for humans in many ways: following a conversation despite background noise, identifying the source of warning alarms like ambulance sirens, and following sounds such as a person calling from another room.

Directional hearing is rooted in time differences between the ears' reception cells. When a sound reaches one ear sooner than the other, your brain uses this information to determine where the sound came from. The human mind can use time differences of mere microseconds when making this determination. Unfortunately, this principle has been very difficult to apply to hearing aids.

One of the primary problems involves scale. For any device - mechanical or biological - to determine the source of a sound, it must be larger than the sound waves themselves. This is why directional microphones in hearing aids do not work as well as people would like, and why most small insects cannot have directional hearing; or so scientists used to think.

Meet the Ormia Ochracea

The ormia ochracea is a very small fly, usually about two millimeters wide. Yet, to the surprise of many biologists, its directional hearing rivals that of humans. This amazing ability seems to be linked to a special hearing organ within this fly's head: a direct connection between the two ears.

In other hearing organisms, each ear has its own tympanic membrane, or ear drum. In the o. ochracea, the ears are connected at a kind of hinge; the arrangement has been said to look like a seesaw. This connection magnifies the ear drum vibrations caused by sound waves. The o. ochracea can analyze the difference in pressure differences between each membrane in a matter of nanoseconds.

Hearing aid technicians are very excited about this breakthrough as a means to help understand the mechanisms of the ear. Changes in hearing aid designs, construction materials, and more can all lead to greatly enhanced directional hearing for the hearing impaired in the future.

Contact Us

Innovations in hearing aid technology are being made every day. To learn more about current hearing aids, including the best design for you, contact a hearing aid expert from HearingPlanet at 1-800-432-7669.