Binghamton University assistant professor Jian Zhou, PhD ’18, will lead a five-year, $1.84 million project funded by the National Institutes of Health to create a dual-sensing ear canal probe that more accurately and reliably detects otoacoustic emissions.
Chou will work with co-investigators Distinguished Professor Ronald Miles of Binghamton University and Professor Christopher Shera of the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. The team hopes to build a prototype over the first three years and refine its performance through participant testing.
Flow mics have so many potential uses. By reimagining it as a medical device, millions of hearing-impaired people around the world will be able to receive better diagnosis and valuable feedback for treatment. ”
Jian Zhou, Assistant Professor, Binghamton University
Traditional microphones detect sound pressure, but sound also causes air movement, which is detected by particle velocity.
“One of my obsessions is that you don’t have to hear pressure to detect sound; you can detect air movement,” Miles said. “Both are sounds, but all the microphones we make and use today are modeled after the human ear, because humans are arrogant animals and we make everything work the way we do. The truth is, most animals don’t hear any sound at all. They hear movement in the air. This includes many of the insects that can hear. They have mosquito antennae, hair, and other things that move back and forth.”
The rover is built on technology developed by Miles and Zhou, faculty members in the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the University of Applied Sciences, including a patented sensing technology inspired by the way spiders hear sound through their webs.
While completing his Ph.D. at Binghamton, Chou was walking through the university’s nature preserve when he spotted a spider’s web waving in the wind. He returned to Miles’ lab with an idea. Could we use something strong and thin, like spider silk, as a microphone to detect the velocity of particles?
After conducting several experiments, the researchers found that the microphone was able to respond with full fidelity to sounds from 1 hertz to 50 kilohertz, providing a wider frequency range and flatter frequency response than traditional pressure-based microphones.
Although the technique no longer relies on harvesting silk from spiders, Zhou is still grateful for the flash of insight.
“I’m not saying we can do better, but we can use nanotechnology to create structures smaller than insects,” he says. “We can fabricate structures with dimensions of less than 10 nanometers, which are up to 100 times thinner than spider silk.”
The biologically inspired FlowMic was commercialized by Canadian venture TandemLaunch and its spinoff company Soundskrit. For the ear probe, the Binghamton team plans to make it smaller, integrate a laser for greater accuracy, and incorporate a more traditional sound pressure microphone, while ensuring it is safe for patients.
When the sound enters your ears, a much quieter sound returns. Once the device picks it up and analyzes it, an audiologist can determine if there is a problem with your hearing.
The cochlea, a spiral-shaped cavity in which sensory hairs pick up sound waves, produces otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) in response to auditory stimuli. Studies have shown that OAEs disappear when the inner ear is damaged.
The research is complicated by the narrowness of the ear canal and the even smaller human hearing system, but Miles is looking forward to helping with the design. “This project requires incredible advances in technology. We’re doing it because we’re engineers who make things.”
“If successful, this project will lead to a deeper understanding of how the ear works and introduce new equipment that can detect hearing loss earlier and more accurately,” Zhou said.
