Chinese researchers have developed the world's first bionic neural device that allows the brains of individuals with hearing impairments to "understand" sounds instead of just "hearing" them.
The device, created by a team of researchers from Nankai University in Tianjin City, northern China, offers a new electronic substitution and repair approach to hearing reconstruction, going beyond conventional cochlear implants.
"Currently, cochlear implants only address the problem of 'hearing.' However, limited by fixed mechanisms based on time signals and a limited number of electrodes, cochlear implants still lag far behind the natural hearing system in terms of temporal resolution and speech recognition in complex acoustic environments," said Xu Wentao, who led the research at the School of Electronic and Optical Engineering, in a Nankai University press release.
"Our goal is not just to make this system capable of 'hearing,' but to enable it to truly 'understand' sound, meaning it is able to select, process, and transmit valuable auditory information like natural nerves," he said, noting that the new device marks a crucial step in hearing restoration from "restoring perception" to "rebuilding function."
The study, titled "Artificial neuromorphic interface for hearing restoration," was published online July 1 in the journal Nature Materials.
According to the study, hearing depends not only on the ear but also on the auditory nerve, which acts like a "superhighway" that transmits sound signals to the brain. Sensorineural hearing loss, a type of deafness caused by damage to this pathway, affects about 3 percent of the global population.
Traditional cochlear implants can convert sound into electrical signals, but still rely on the patient's remaining auditory nerve to complete the final transmission process.
Once the auditory nerve is severely damaged or lost, "even the most advanced cochlear implants become ineffective," Xu said, adding that this long-standing challenge is what his team's breakthrough aims to address.
The new device, described as a "neuromorphic interface" that mimics the natural coding process of the biological auditory nerve, integrates sound acquisition, neural coding, semantic processing, and bioelectrical output into a complete artificial neural loop.
The research team explains that the device not only captures sound but also filters, analyzes, and encodes it in a way that mimics the natural auditory system, before then relaying meaningful information to the brain.
"Going forward, we will continue our research in the areas of neural repair and bionic intelligence, and work hard to move our core technologies from the laboratory to clinical use and the market," Xu said.
