HearHook: Improve Medical Communication and Combat Hearing Loss

Effective teamwork and communication are essential to military medical care success and soldier survivability. While currently deployed noise cancellation systems work well at cancelling harmful sound, they lack a continuous communication feature during variable high noise situations, leading to inconsistent use. Ineffective noise protection and communication modalities in theatre as well as expanded use of surgical masks due to COVID not only lead to poor communication during medical care but lead to debilitating hearing loss once our veterans return to the civilian space. Vivonics, Inc. and Mayo Clinic audiology researchers propose to deliver both the desired medicine-focused communication platform and affordable, highly effective hearing assistance for veterans in one, comfortable, and highly usable commercial system: Mayo Clinic’s HearHook. This communication modality is unique in the way that it delivers sound to the ear as well as in the way that it boosts the most commonly muted and/or lost part of human speech/hearing: high frequency sound. In Phase I, Vivonics and Mayo Clinic personnel will confirm this use case through USAF stakeholder identification and buy-in. Phase II will progress with a rapid HearHook redesign to ruggedize the system and add any additional essential features identified in Phase I. Soldiers should not have to make the choice between effective communication and personal protection equipment use (e.g. hearing protection, surgical masks, etc.); the proposed pivot aims to make it a non-question.