A team of engineers at The University of Texas at Austin has developed a tiny, low-power device that mimics a fly’s hearing mechanism, which could be used to build the next generation of hypersensitive hearing aids with intelligent microphones that could adaptively focus only on those conversations or sounds of interest to the wearer.
The device was inspired by the ability of a type of fly with ultra-sensitive acute hearing, which uses a sophisticated sound-processing mechanism resembling a seesaw to determine direction of sound within two degrees.
Using the fly’s ear structure as a model, the researchers built a miniature pressure-sensitive device out of silicon that replicates the fly’s super-evolved hearing structure. The 2mm-wide device is nearly identical in size to the fly’s hearing organ and relies on piezoelectric materials that turn mechanical pressure into electric signals allowing the device to operate with very little power.
