This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: About six years ago, hearing researcher Dr. Kelly Miles had a stroke just a week after having a baby.
The medical emergency left her unable to speak or read. While her language recovered relatively quickly, she continued to struggle to follow conversations in noisy environments, not because of peripheral hearing loss, but because of the way her brain was processing sound and communication after the stroke. "I really started to understand the problem of people who have difficulties hearing," says Miles, an MQ-Sonova research fellow at Macquarie University Hearing.
"Before I had the stroke, I was really thinking about it from an academic perspective, but afterward I really felt the impact of struggling to communicate with people." It also made her question some of the conventional advice given to people who find communication difficult, such as socializing one-on-one in quiet environments. I need to be out with my friends, not one friend at a time," she says. "Everywhere we go to socialize is noisy.
Even if you go to a quiet place, the very fact that you're there talking with your group of friends means you're going to make noise." That experience gave added personal significance to the question at the heart of the Motion Optic and Sound sensors to Assess Interactive Communication (MOSAIC) project: Can we detect when a person is struggling to communicate during a real conversation? Led by Macquarie University, MOSAIC was supported by the NSW Smart Sensing Network Grand Challenge Fund and included researchers from Western Sydney University and industry partners Cochlear and Google Research Australia. Miles says most traditional hearing research has focused on listening.
"You listen to something and then you track performance," she says. "But when we're listening in the real world, we're usually communicating. There are two or more people involved." The team created a multisensor laboratory capable of capturing participants' movements, eye behavior, pupil dilation and speech as they spoke face to face, while background noise was gradually increased to make communication more challenging.
The result was a huge data set, almost a terabyte of data, allowing researchers to explore how people adapt as communicating becomes harder. Pupils can dilate when people are under greater cognitive load, making pupil response a useful indicator of listening effort. The researchers also tracked where people looked during conversations.
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