University of Texas at Dallas researchers have developed smartphone-based apps that solve the biggest problems for people with hearing loss: filtering out background noise and improving speech perception. The article is one of 67 studies that researchers have presented about their work for people with hearing loss in academic journals and at conferences since 2014. “That is what a person with hearing loss needs.”Worldwide about 466 million people, including 34 million children, experience disabling hearing loss, according to the World Health Organization. “Persons with hearing loss typically report difficulty hearing speech in noisy environments despite sophisticated noise reduction circuitry in personal assistive technology,” Thibodeau said. To develop the technology, the researchers first created massive databases of different clean speech signals, background noise signals and noisy speech signals that a person might encounter in daily life.