Arkansas company at work on device to help deaf 'hear' without expensive surgery

RoboHear uses touch technology

FILE PHOTO: Brandon Foshee of Magnolia invented RoboGlasses as a high-tech aid for the blind.
FILE PHOTO: Brandon Foshee of Magnolia invented RoboGlasses as a high-tech aid for the blind.

A Magnolia company deep into its work on helping the blind "see" has now turned to helping the deaf "hear" without expensive surgery.

Fauxsee Innovations has won a one-year $225,000 research award to help develop and test RoboHear, a device aimed at speech understanding among the deaf, Brandon Foshee, a company co-founder and now its president and chief executive officer, said Friday. The grant is from the National Institutes of Health.

Fauxsee Innovations already has been awarded two patents and some $600,000 in grants for its RoboGlasses, which help the blind detect obstacles, from about waist- to head-high, that sometimes aren't detected by guide dogs and canes. The glasses use "haptic" or touch technology, with a sensor in each lens and five "linear resonant actuators" along each stem that give different pulses as the wearer nears an obstacle.

A clinical human trial for the RoboGlasses is expected to be conducted sometime this year. Good results in that will move the concept closer to approval by the federal Food and Drug Administration, which would allow the glasses to be covered by Medicaid and Medicare.

The same touch-sensation idea is being used for RoboHear, Foshee said.

While there are about 172,000 words in current use in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are only 44 phonetic sounds, Foshee said.

Like the sensors in RoboGlasses, those in the RoboHear devices will have up to 123 haptic sensations to recognize phonetic sounds. That's enough to help the profoundly deaf join in on normal conversations, Foshee said.

The Arkansas Small Business and Technology Innovation Development Center and its chief consultant, Rebecca Todd, have been instrumental in Fauxee's growth since its founding in 2011, Foshee said.

The first year under the grant will involve researchers at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences developing a "haptic feedback system and see if people can learn to recognize haptic sensations as phonetics," Foshee said.

His devices will be for the profoundly deaf. "Hearing aids work just fine for people who can hear just a little bit, but for the profoundly deaf, there's only the cochlear implant," he said. "Those cost a lot of money, depending on where you get it done and whether you have one or two implants."

Cochlear implants cost from $40,000 to $100,000, and not all entirely deaf people are good candidates for using them, he said. He said his goal is to price his RoboHear devices at less than $2,000.

Business on 09/22/2018

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