Instead of fancy shmancy AI, could a pupil tracker on eyeglasses be used to estimate where a person wants to hear and use phasing to amplify the signal from there?
You have two microphones already, spaced about 30 cm apart...
You have two microphones already, spaced about 30 cm apart...
but you don't need eye tracking all the time, as most you can latch on to the location of the speaker without looking at them continuously.
The possibilities are rather good, but it needs someone willing to fund the research
But my hearing aids do in fact already have two mics per ear (about half an inch apart), and use them to let me block out some of the noise behind me.
I suspect you definitely get big improvements from a greater spacing in a microphone array than what fits on an ear though!