Today's tech is loaded with features most of us never use. Why? Simply stated, there's no real user manual. Maybe no one ever told you that you could unsend an email. But you need to set up the feature before you need to use it. Tap or click for steps on how to unsend an email. Did you know you can skip the ads on YouTube?

Starkey Hearing Technologies, Eden Prairie, Minn, has offered a teaser video of the company's Livio AI hearing aid, what it reports to be the world's first hearing aid with sensors and artificial intelligence. The official launch of Livio AI is on August 27. As reported in The Hearing Review, the company announced at its 2018 Innovations Expo that it would be bringing to market the world's first hearing aid with inertial sensors that can provide information for physical activity tracking. Along with physical fitness applications (like the Dash Pro tailored by Starkey), these sensors may also be used for balance management and the detection of falls--a massive $67.7 billion public health problem by 2020 which is currently responsible for an older adult being admitted to a US emergency room every 13 seconds. At the 2018 Innovations Expo, Starkey CTO and Executive VP of Engineering Achin Bhowmik--who had previously served as VP of Perceptual Computing at Intel--also spoke about how, in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) would be used in hearing aids for natural responses to voice commands, and eventually be able to provide advanced capabilities like real-time language translation.

Aside from that inconsistency, Google did a pretty good job of identifying the patterns in the image. To accomplish this feat, Google's pattern recognition engine has been trained on millions of images of cats, mammals, whiskers, fur, etc. Note: We always thought Niko was a Tabby, but after looking at some pictures of "Dragon Li" breed cats, we're reconsidering. Aside from recognizing your cat photos, what are other real-world applications of machine learning that might impact your life? How does the science of machine learning offer to improve hearing aids? As any experienced hearing aid user knows, hearing in background noise is extremely difficult.

This is part of CNET's "Tech Enabled" series about the role technology plays in helping the disability community. When Shannon Conn puts her hearing aids in her ears in the morning, a few things happen. The coffee maker starts brewing. When someone rings the doorbell, the chime streams straight into her ear. Conn, a 43-year-old special education advocate from College Grove, Tennessee, wears the Oticon Opn, which features the ability to link up with other connected devices.

A smart cognitive hearing aid could make life significantly easier for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Whether it's Apple's smart cochlear implant collaboration or tools designed to make sign language communication easier, there is no shortage of cutting-edge gadgetry available to make life easier for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. A new piece of technology coming out of Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science could make things even better, however -- courtesy of a hearing aid that is designed to read brain activity to determine which voice a hearing aid user is most interested in listening to and then focusing in on it. The resulting "cognitive hearing aid" could be transformative in settings like crowded rooms in which multiple people are speaking at the same time. "My research has been focused on understanding how speech is processed in the brain, and to create models of it that can be used in automatic speech-recognition technologies," Nima Mesgarani, an associate professor of electrical engineering, told Digital Trends. "Working at the intersection of brain science and engineering, I saw a unique opportunity to combine the latest advances from both fields, to create a solution for decoding the attention of a listener to a specific speaker in a crowded scene which can be used to amplify that speaker relative to others."

Alcides Moreno and his brother Edgar were window washers in New York City. The two Ecuadorian immigrants worked for City Wide Window Cleaning, suspended high above the congested streets, dragging wet squeegees across the acres of glass that make up the skyline of Manhattan. On 7 December 2007, the brothers took an elevator to the roof of Solow Tower, a 47-storey apartment building on the Upper East Side. Over 420,000 people die worldwide each year after falling. Falls are the second leading cause of death by injury, after car accidents. They stepped onto the 16-foot-long, three-foot-wide aluminium scaffolding designed to slowly lower them down the black glass of the building. But the anchors holding the 1,250-pound platform instead gave way, plunging it and them 472 feet to the alley below. Scientists studying falling are developing'safe landing responses' to help limit the damage from falls. If you are falling, first protect your head – 37 per cent of falls by elderly people in a study by Professor Stephen Robinovitch of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, involved hitting their heads, particularly during falls forward. Fight trainers and parachute jump coaches encourage people to try not to fall straight forward or backward. The key is to roll, and try to let the fleshy side parts of your body absorb the impact.

My mother began to lose her hearing while I was away at college. I would return home to share what I'd learned, and she would lean in to hear. Soon it became difficult for her to hold a conversation if more than one person spoke at a time. Now, even with a hearing aid, she struggles to distinguish the sounds of each voice. When my family visits for dinner, she still pleads with us to speak in turn. My mother's hardship reflects a classic problem for hearing aid manufacturers. The human auditory system can naturally pick out a voice in a crowded room, but creating a hearing aid that mimics that ability has stumped signal processing specialists, artificial intelligence experts, and audiologists for decades.

My mother began to lose her hearing while I was away at college. I would return home to share what I'd learned, and she would lean in to hear. Soon it became difficult for her to hold a conversation if more than one person spoke at a time. Now, even with a hearing aid, she struggles to distinguish the sounds of each voice. When my family visits for dinner, she still pleads with us to speak in turn. My mother's hardship reflects a classic problem for hearing aid manufacturers.

A REVOLUTIONARY hearing aid was just one of a number of new technological exhibits on show at the Men's Health Expo in Tamworth yesterday to coincide with Men's Health Week. A REVOLUTIONARY hearing aid was just one of a number of new technological exhibits on show at the Men's Health Expo in Tamworth yesterday to coincide with Men's Health Week. The hearing aid allows the person wearing it to focus on a specific conversation more clearly while drowning out any other noises in the room. It has been designed to select the best speech over noise using parallel processing through a new concept called syncro. Spokesman James Battersby for Oticon, which manufactures the hearing aid, said already the revolutionary device was a big hit in Australia after only being launched three weeks ago.