The irony is obvious. Awan is a speech scientist. Through research, he helps speech pathologists improve clinical services for people with speech disorders. His momentary vocal discomfort creates an opening to discuss — and simplify — his most recent groundbreaking work.

“Being hoarse isn’t necessarily a problem unless it persists for more than two weeks,” Awan says. “When it disrupts daily life beyond an irritation, medical referral and potential speech pathology services come into play. The goal of my research is to help speech pathologists more easily determine the ‘why’ regarding voice disorders.”

With his current research, Awan and his team can literally hear the future of speech pathology. They can see the future, too. In fact, Awan can hold it in the palm of his hand. For more than 30 years, the research professor in UCF’s School of Communication Sciences and Disorders has focused his lifelong interest in acoustics and his expertise in voice evaluation to find the root causes of communication disorders that affect as many as one in ten people in the U.S. One of the unsolved problems in voice-disorder assessments enticed him out of retirement so he could pursue a simple solution, this time with a $3.12 million dollar grant funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and a team of six interdisciplinary researchers from three universities.

Today, Awan and his team believe they have an answer: a whistle. Not a cumbersome costly machine, but a vortex whistle small enough to fit into a shirt pocket. In its final form, it will be biodegradable, disposable, and affordable. It will have no moving parts and doesn’t need to be powered. Awan envisions the whistles being as readily available as a bag of dental-floss picks. Accompanying software that captures and analyzes the vortex whistle tone completes the system.

He also sees them changing lives, soon.

“Our version of the vortex whistle addresses a widely known deficit that speech pathologists deal with in terms of accurately assessing voice-disordered patients,” Awan says.

To uncomplicate the picture, he compares the evaluation of voice to the evaluation of vision. “Imagine if your optometrist said, ‘We really should do one other test to make sure we’re on the right track with your prescription … but we don’t have the equipment because it’s too expensive.’ That’s the scenario what we want to change in speech pathology.”

Voice production, Awan says, combines the physical laryngeal component (the “voice box”) with respiratory airflow. To properly assess and treat patients with voice disorders, four key areas need to be measured:

1. Perceptual analysis. “The therapist listens to the patient, describes the voice and categorizes it. This requires training but no additional instrumentation.”
2. Visual analysis. “Images of vocal folds, often referred to as ‘vocal cords’, are obtained by a laryngologist or an associated professional under the supervision of a laryngologist).”
3. Acoustic analysis. “The acoustic signal is recorded and analyzed for measurements related to a potential voice difference and the severity of the problem. Almost all speech/voice clinicians have access to a computer, microphone and analysis software capable of doing this type of measurement.”

And that leads to number four, the critical link that’s usually missing.

“Aerodynamics,” Awan says. “When you produce voice, the vocal folds vibrate because of air coming up from the lungs. The voice is dependent on the respiratory system’s capacity and ability to generate air flow and pressure. If there’s a deficit in producing or controlling respiratory forces, the voice is often affected. There could be an underlying neurological problem, or a medical issue like asthma or COPD that may require medical treatment or voice therapy. Until now, the respiratory element in speech has been overlooked because there’s been no low-cost, accurate, available method to measure aerodynamics. This vortex whistle, with easy-to-use software, will make it possible in a day-to-day clear-cut fashion.”

Awan talks about how this project came about.

“This all started at a voice disorder conference,” he says. “People were discussing the fact there were no low-cost tools to measure aerodynamics as it relates to voice. In my mind, I knew there must be something out there that could be reimagined.”

Awan, the speech scientist who once thought following his graduate work in the U.S. that he might return to his childhood home in London, Ontario, Canada, to pursue a career in music, used his knowledge in acoustics to consider a few ideas. A flute? A referee’s whistle?

“Neither of them produces a sound specifically related to the amount of air flow going into them,” Awan says. “Then I became aware of the vortex whistle. It has no moving parts. Air enters the cylinder, which forces the air to spiral and exert pressure against the walls of the cylinder before exiting. This creates a signal that has a pitch and frequency that are directly proportional to the amount of air flowing into the whistle. That’s the principle.”

The frequency of the vortex whistle sound wave can then be converted to measurements of airflow and volume.

The vortex whistle’s potential is why Awan took up his friend and colleague, UCF Professor David Eddins, on an offer to unretire, form a team, and work toward applying the science. The NIDCD-funded grant has accelerated the progress. At Purdue, his son, Jordan Awan, leads data analysis while aerodynamics engineer Jun Chen works on modifications of the whistle for specific tasks. At Emory ����ֱ��, Amanda Gillespie conducts studies with voice disordered human subjects. And at UCF, Awan, Eddins and Assistant Professor Victoria McKenna have access to lab space built to spec in the Communication Technologies Research Center in the UCF Innovative Center — sound-treated booths, an anechoic chamber and a reception area for subjects participating in tests. In the same building are a speech and hearing clinic and capabilities for 3D printing and simulation.

“For the vortex whistle to be ready for use, its construction has to be very precise,” Awan says. “It also requires software development to accurately capture and analyze a somewhat difficult soundwave. We’re getting close.”

The Journal of Voice has already published the study from Awan’s team as an award-winning cover story. Since then, various versions of the whistle have been computer-modeled and 3D printed. The modifications are being tested in the first of three large-scale human subject studies. The second study, in 2025, will look at subjects from 5 to 90 years old to see how well the vortex whistle works to document potential changes in measurements of respiratory volume and airflow during voice production across the lifespan. And the final study will utilize the vortex whistle as a treatment-outcome measure before and after medical procedures for vocal-fold paralysis.

From there, the application could be far-reaching.

“My hope with the vortex whistle,” Awan says, “is that we start with speech and voice-disordered patients, and then identify its usefulness in other areas of medicine and associated areas such as exercise science and sports physiology. By making it affordable and accessible, there’s no limit to how many people can ultimately benefit from it.”

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), approximately 15% of American adults, or 37.5 million people, report some trouble hearing. The developments taking place in Eddins’ newly created Communication Technologies Research Center have implications for children and adults facing hearing challenges that stem from trauma, disease and neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as those with age-related conditions and for patients like professional singers or athletes who rely on voice, respiratory and speech health.

The center, based in the CHPS Office of Research, targets four focal areas: voice and upper airway disorders, auditory neuroscience, hearing technologies and simulation technologies. It includes Eddins’ longtime associates, Research Professor Shaheen Awan and Research Assistant Professor Yeonggwang “Paul” Park, both of whom also joined CHPS in Fall 2023, and Ann Clock Eddins, who is a professor and director of the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders and brings research expertise in auditory neuroscience. New to the center this summer are Assistant Professor Andy Dykstra and Research Assistant Professor Monica Folkerts. Plans are in place to hire five additional faculty members in the months ahead.

A More Intelligent Hearing Aid

Eddins comes to UCF after 13 years at the ����ֱ�� of South Florida (USF) where he served as the director of the Auditory and Speech Sciences Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research facility dedicated to improving hearing and communication. For the last two years, he and his team have been working to develop a “smart” hearing aid that can predict the intent of a user and intuitively change the way it processes sound to meet the goals of the wearer.

Hearing aids made with today’s technology simply process sound and don’t know anything about the wearer’s intent or how they want to interact (or not) with sounds and the environment. Eddins is creating a device that uses accelerometers to receive data about head movements and provide indicators of what the user is doing and their hearing needs, which in turn enables the device to adjust itself accordingly.

“Imagine you’re really engaged in conversation and you’re nodding up and down, shaking your head left and right, laughing and talking. Those actions and movements may be associated with turn taking and looking at communication partners and can convey that you’re trying to understand what’s going on,” Eddins says. “In that situation, you might want the hearing aid signal processing to be aggressive to maximize clarity of other people’s speech and focus on individual speakers, and for background noise to be minimized.”

In addition to making current hearing aids available more intelligent, the technology could also be extended to cochlear implants and any other head worn systems developed in the future, including the possibility of small, head mounted chips that interface with smartphones.

Grants from the hearing aid manufacturer Sonova support the project, which is in early stages. Eddins and his collaborators are currently examining the accelerometer technology available, establishing benchmarks for accuracy, and studying and coding head movements during natural conversations to better infer patterns. Eventually, they’ll tie the patterns of head movement and measures from other sensor technologies to the associated communication actions.

Simple Yet Highly Sophisticated

Eddins and Awan have been collaborating for several years to find new ways to better diagnose and treat voice disorders. Their current projects include a five-year $3.12 million NIH grant to develop a more accessible and affordable tool for speech-language pathologists (SLP) to conduct more comprehensive patient evaluations.

One of the components of a voice evaluation is a respiratory evaluation, which can assess the air coming through the lungs to the vocal folds.

“The challenge is that most SLPs who do voice evaluations don’t do a respiratory evaluation,” Eddins says. “Part of the problem is that the equipment is expensive and not very accessible or user friendly.”

Awan and his son Jordan Awan, a researcher at Purdue ����ֱ��, developed a 3D-printed handheld whistle that a patient blows into, producing a sound frequency directly proportional to the air flow the patient is generating. An accompanying smartphone app measures the pitch of the sound and provides an accurate measure of the patient’s breathing capacity.

The device can obtain the same information as medical devices on the market that sell for hundreds to thousands of dollars, Eddins says. He envisions the whistle one day being available in individual, disposable packages. The simple yet highly sophisticated solution could potentially be used by SLPs to accurately measure respiratory function in patient evaluations, as well as by clinicians in other disciplines, like sports medicine practitioners, or even a general practitioner who needs to assess breathing capacity to help diagnose a respiratory illness.

The grant is enabling the researchers to evaluate the whistle across the lifespan and, along with research partners across the country, establish its viability for future clinical use. A mechanical engineer at Purdue ����ֱ�� has developed a fluid dynamics model and is helping to optimize the whistle’s performance, and scientists at Emory ����ֱ�� are evaluating its utility with patients at a voice clinic.

Assessing Voice Disorders

Eddins and Awan are also studying adult and pediatric voice disorders, focusing specifically on developing better tools for clinicians to more effectively evaluate the perception of a patient’s voice thanks to a $3.17 million grant and a second $2.9 million grant, both from NIH. This work began over a decade ago with Eddins’ long-time research colleague Provost Rahul Shrivastav at Indiana ����ֱ��.

Voice disorders can be caused by a wide variety of factors ranging from vocal abuse (which can be anything that strains the vocal cords, like too much talking, laughing or shouting), to exposure to chemicals or smoking, and medical conditions like cancer or certain diseases that affect the nerves that control the vocal cords. Factors like these can cause vocal cords to vibrate abnormally, causing patients to experience problems with pitch, volume or voice quality.

Pediatric voice disorders are rarely researched despite being very common. The intubation of infants can damage their vocal folds, sometimes rendering them non-functioning, and when this occurs, a child may vibrate their mouth to create speech and sounds, instead of using vocal folds.

Eddins and colleagues want to examine the validity of tools currently being used by SLPs to assess voice perception. Today, that typically involves a SLP rating what they hear when a patient speaks on a Likert or a visual analog scale, for example, by assigning a number between one and 100. These methods don’t always provide reliable data.

“No one has systematically compared the effectiveness of current clinical tools to those we have developed in the laboratory,” Eddins says. The long-term goal is to translate robust measurement methods used in laboratory investigations into more reliable and valid clinical tools that are accessible, affordable and easy to use.

Stopping Sound Sensitivities

Eddins’ past work includes the development of a patented hearing device and treatment method to help people with severe hyperacusis, a condition that produces an abnormal sensitivity to sound. Patients with this condition are unable to even tolerate common everyday noises like dishes clanging or doors slamming, and the condition can have an adverse impact on quality of life. There are no medical treatments currently available.

“The idea is that you need to somehow make these louder sounds that are offensive and uncomfortably loud, more comfortable for these individuals,” says Eddins, who developed a device that produces sound therapy to enable patients to better manage their condition. The devices protect against exposure to high-level sounds while providing a constant, low level, soft, therapeutic background sound which gradually builds a higher level of tolerance for patients. At the same time, the device automatically adjusts itself to protect against new sounds a patient would find aversive.

“Over time, we basically are altering the way their brains are responding to high level sounds, reducing the excitability of the central nervous system to those high-level sounds,” Eddins says. “If sound levels in the environment get up to be above your tolerance, devices turn down the sound level, so they actually kind of function like ear plugs when you need them by reducing sound level, but when you don’t need them, they’re providing healthy, comfortable sound exposure all the time.”

In a clinical trial, Eddins’ sound therapy was coupled with traditional counseling specific to patients with hyperacusis, a combination that together yielded a significant improvement in their ability to tolerate high level sounds.

He plans to pursue a larger scale field trial, with multiple sites. He also believes the treatment is promising for people with autism spectrum disorder, a population that often experiences abnormal sound sensitivity.

Changing the Brain

Eddins’ work to address hyperacusis is an extension of his interest in neuroplasticity, and his development of sound therapies designed to help the aging population adapt to hearing changes and the associated natural changes that occur in the way the brain processes.

A patent is pending on his second sound therapy device, this one targeting the specific auditory deficits most likely to occur with age-related hearing loss.

“Most people think of hearing problems as a hearing loss, like you don’t hear certain soft sounds,” Eddins says. “But another type of hearing problem is that sounds have some acoustic property that your brain just doesn’t process or interpret very well. And there are lots of different types of acoustic properties that need to be processed.”

His sound therapy device can distinguish between the processing deficits and tailor the therapy provided — whether that’s providing a soft noise or adjusting certain speech sounds commonly misheard.

“Rather than just put a hearing aid on, what we would like to do is change the way the brain reacts and responds and processes,” Eddins says.

In the new Center, Eddins and the team will continue their research, clinical trials, and the development, design and validation of diagnostic instruments. They’ll coordinate product field trials; conduct product testing, evaluation and comparisons of hearing enhancement and hearing protection devices; and provide behavioral and electrophysiological assessments of hearing and auditory functions.

The team was recently funded by Sonova to study the interaction between hearing loss, hearing aids, communication and cognition. The focus of this investigation is to determine how hearing aid sound processing may improve communicative and cognitive function by employing a unique combination of cutting-edge laboratory measurements as well as real-time measurements of communicative and cognitive function during the course of a person’s everyday life.

Additionally, the center will focus on using simulation technology to further their research in developing educational and teaching tools, as well as for translational clinical practice.

Eddins is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He earned a bachelor’s in speech and hearing sciences and a master’s in audiology from the ����ֱ�� of North Carolina and a doctorate in experimental psychology from the ����ֱ�� of Florida.