Hearables

Collaborators: 
Prof. Danilo Mandic, Professor of Signal Processing
Ian Williams, Research Associate
Matthew Harrison, Designer
Sophie Horrocks, Designer
and Minder Champions / research participants.

What was the need?

Professor Danilo Mandic’s team in the Electrical Engineering department at Imperial have been exploring how augmented hearing aids might be used to read physiological measurements from the wearer. In particular, the potential to measure brain activity (EEG) through an ‘in-ear’ device has interesting potential for dementia research, although other useful measurements such as heart rate can also be obtained via this route.

Project stage

What were the aims and objectives of the project?

Asking people with dementia to wear a device in their ear poses several usability and acceptability challenges Initial scoping is necessary to explore possible use-cases to establish where the technology has the most potential to have a meaningful impact with this demographic. 

The technology is still at an early and experimental stage, so the team does not yet have firm ideas on how they would like people to use it. It may be useful during sleep, or during certain activities such as exercise or performing cognitive tasks. It may also have greater benefit at the early stages of dementia in establishing a diagnosis (which may also have ergonomic and acceptability advantages).

The identified design challenges include issues around the acceptability of having a device in the ear for people with dementia. Will users tolerate a new device, and for how long, and for what activities? Does the device need to be part of a hearing aid in order to be familiar to users who already wear one? Will the device have an impact on the users’ hearing or balance while wearing it?

There are other practical challenges around cleaning and hygiene, lost and broken devices, and the overall incentives for people to wear it by providing meaningful feedback and data to the wearer or their carers. 

Lastly, are there additional benefits that could be incorporated into the device to provide added value to the user. Perhaps audio cues, or safety measures to help mitigate the risk of falls when balance is perceived to be at risk.

How was the project approached?

We are still in the discovery phase of this work as the technology is further from being deployed in people’s homes in comparison to other strands of the centre’s work.

What role did Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) play in this project?

To date we have had speculative conversations with participants to explore their perceptions of the technology, and to see how acceptable they think it might be. These conversations helped raise some of the issues described above. We presented a variety of form factors based on off-the-shelf audio devices (earphones, headphones, smart glasses), to see what they think would be most appropriate for the demographic, and when they might wear them.

We will do more work to understand the daily routines of our intended users to find opportunities to build the product experience in, for example, linking the device to watching TV may provide a good controlled situation to wear the device for a short time, while measuring brain activity against different types of TV programming.

What were the key insights to emerge? 

At this early stage we have more questions than answers, and so we will update this insights section as the project evolves.

What are the next steps? 

One likely next step would be a simulation study using off the shelf devices to explore acceptable wearing patterns, and uncover ergonomic issues, while the technology continues its development path.

There will also be a lot of potential in testing products with healthy participants to hone the technology, product and service design before asking people affected with dementia to start wearing the devices for any considerable amount of time.

Photo is illustrative, and not from this project team. Photo by Petr Macháček on Unsplash