Chinese researchers develop device for hearing-impaired people to 'understand' sound

TIANJIN -- Chinese researchers have developed the world's first bionic nerve device that enables the brain of hearing-impaired individuals to "understand" sound rather than merely "hearing" it.

The device, created by researchers from Nankai University in North China's Tianjin municipality, offers a novel electronic substitution and repair approach for hearing reconstruction, going beyond conventional cochlear implants.

"Currently, cochlear implants only address the problem of 'hearing.' However, limited by their fixed clock-driven mechanism and the finite number of electrodes, they still fall significantly short of the natural auditory system in terms of temporal resolution and speech recognition in complex acoustic environments," said Xu Wentao, who led the research at the College of Electronic and Optical Engineering, in the university's press release on Monday.

"Our goal is not just to make the system 'hear', but to enable it to truly 'understand,' meaning to select, process and transmit valuable auditory information just like a natural nerve," he said, noting that the new device marks a critical step in auditory restoration from "recovering perception" to "rebuilding function."

The study, titled "An artificial neuromorphic interface for auditory restoration", was published online on July 1 in Nature Materials.

Hearing relies not on the ears alone, but on the auditory nerve, which acts like a "superhighway" that delivers sound signals to the brain. Sensorineural hearing loss, a type of deafness caused by damage to this pathway, affects about 3 percent of the global population, according to the research.

Traditional cochlear implants can convert sound into electrical signals but still rely on the patient's remaining auditory nerve to complete the "last mile" of transmission.

Once the auditory nerve is severely impaired or missing, "even the most advanced cochlear implants become ineffective," said Xu, adding that this is the long-standing challenge his team's breakthrough is able to address.

The new device, described as a "neuromorphic interface" that mimics the natural encoding processes of biological auditory nerves, integrates sound acquisition, neural encoding, semantic processing and bioelectrical output into a complete artificial neural loop.

It not only picks up sounds but also filters, analyzes and encodes them in a way that resembles the natural auditory system, before delivering meaningful information to the brain, the research team explained.

"Going forward, we will continue our research in neural repair and bionic intelligence, and work hard to move our core technologies from the lab to clinical use and the market," said Xu.

"We hope to achieve more breakthroughs in neural prosthetics, intelligent healthcare, brain-computer interfaces and embodied intelligence," he added.