Technology to support deployment of intelligent audio devices to function indepen

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of this project is to develop technologies and in Phase III devices for better hearing that would be inexpensive, offer extraordinary benefit in difficult listening conditions, be easily accessible andesthetically beautiful. The technologies to be developed in this study would facilitate the deployment of not only inexpensive, small, modern looking, and high quality personal amplifiers, but would most importantly enable interconnectivity between different devices. Thus, the participating devices would act as a smart swarm, and would coordinate and share signal and noise information among themselves and with plethora of smart objects in the world around. In its simplest form the swarm intelligence wouldprovide to the listener the signal picked up by the device located closest to the source of sound and thus deliver to the listener the best available signal to noise ratio. In a more complex form, a multitude of devices would team up to provide a mor