Starkey debuts hearing aid technology 5 years in the making
Starkey’s Genesis AI is the hearing industry’s greatest engineering achievement to date, according to the company. The 5 year journey to the recent launch of Genesis AI began in 2017, when Achin Bhowmik, PhD, stepped into the role of Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering at Starkey. The former Intel Corporation executive and Starkey President and CEO, Brandon Sawalich, kept the project under wraps, developing and testing the new technology for years. In the latest episode of Starkey Sound Bites, Bhowmik shares the backstory with podcast host and Starkey Chief Innovation Officer, Dave Fabry,PhD. He also discusses the details of, what he says, sets Genesis AI hearing aids apart from the rest: they are built to mimic the brain.
“The brain is an amazing computational system. In fact, the most amazing computational system that we know of. At its core, you have a network of neurons that are heavily interconnected and then learn from the information that is thrown at it”, explained Bhowmik. “When a kid is learning to recognize language, they’re basically training that neural network. Copying a page from biology, the technology equivalent of that is a deep neural network built into the device. Well, there are two ways of doing that. One, you could just build it in a software, which is what most people have done so far. With Genesis AI, it was an opportunity for us to go one step further and build a hardware architecture where neurons are interconnected in a block on the chip itself”.
Starkey’s Neuro Processor within Genesis AI reportedly features the industry’s most advanced processor technology, which mimics the function of the central auditory system through a Deep Neural Network (DNN) on-chip accelerator. It is the smallest processor ever by Starkey, but also the most powerful with 6 times more transistors, according to the company It is also loaded with 5 times more computational memory and 10 times the amount of non-volatile memory.
To listen to the full interview with Bhowmik, visit StarkeySoundBites.com or find the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
Source: Starkey
Images: Starkey
