Yellow Ormia Fly Key to Better Hearing Aides

Yellow Ormia flies have helped researchers develop a new hearing aid design that will help those who wear it identify where the sounds they hear are coming from, reports Wired.co.uk. The female flies can find male crickets – which they use to embed their eggs in — by tracking the crickets’ chirps, even when the crickets have stopped making a sound. Researchers from the University of Strathclyde and the MRC/CSO Institute for Hearing Research leveraged this knowledge and received a grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to develop the innovative hearing aid. The design of hearing aides have not changed much over the years. Essentially, they are microphones that amplify sound but do not capture directional sound. Unfortunately, this can cause those who wear hearing aides to become disoriented because the devices amplify all sound, not just the sound the wearer wants to hear. The article says the new hearing aid design does a better job of collecting directional sound. Bill Whitmer, MRC/CSO Institute for Hearing Research, is quoted as saying, “The microphone works in a similar way to the Ormia fly ear system, which has two membranes mechanically linked together.”  The difference, he tells Wired.co.uk, is in the “layout of membranes and a wider bandwidth.”