Press and Media

For many years, we have relied on cameras, lidar, and radar to detect the environment around passenger cars. However, the perception of external sounds has been lacking, even regarding automated driving. That is why Fraunhofer IDMT-HSA is researching the integration of acoustic sensor technology in the KI4BoardNet project with The Hearing Car. The Oldenburg branch has now equipped research vehicles with new microphones and specially developed measurement technology. To test both, the team traveled to a test site in Sweden in spring together with project partner CARIAD SE.

Implemented as a plug-in, the “Listening Effort Meter" (LE-Meter) developed by Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg allows sound engineers to visualize listening effort during mixing and conduct post-mixing checks to optimize audio quality. The technology has once again found its way from scientific development into commercial application and is intended to bring about improvements in media production on a broad scale.

The exact causes of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) are not fully understood. The Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg wants to use its mobile EEG system for sleep monitoring in the home environment as part of the BMBF-funded research network “Sleep-Neuro-Path” to support the study of neurophysiological sleep characteristics in affected patients. Over the next three years, the project consortium will investigate biological mechanisms of the disease with the aim of helping to develop effective therapies. The project will be presented to the public on May 13, 2025, at the ME/CFS Symposium in Berlin. This presentation can be viewed free of charge via livestream.

Contactless, efficient, sustainable - at the world's leading trade fair for the solar industry in Munich from May 7 to 9, 2025, the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT will be presenting a new approach to cleaning large photovoltaic systems using structure-borne sound.

The 51st Annual Meeting on Acoustics – DAS | DAGA 2025 took place in Copenhagen from March 17 to 20, 2025. The work of Zahra Mansour from the Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg was presented there with the poster “Analysing bowel sound signals: Insights from SonicGuard Data Collection” and was honored with the DAS I DAGA 2025 Poster Award.

The German Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT has launched the "lokalRAIN" research project in collaboration with Pan Acoustics GmbH from Wolfenbüttel. The goal of the project is to develop an acoustic rain sensor and a cost-efficient sensor network for the precise real-time detection and transmission of precipitation data. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and runs from October 2024 to June 2026.

In the latest episode of the DLG Podcast Agriculture, our expert in Music Information Retrieval & Machine Listening, Jakob Abeßer, talks with Martina Clausen (DLG) about the use of AI for analyzing natural sounds.

Jan Rennies-Hochmuth has been appointed professor of Hearing-, Speech- and Neurotechnology at the Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics as part of a joint process between the University of Oldenburg and the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT.

Sina Buchholz from Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg received the Student Conference Award from the National Hearing Conservation Association (NHCA). The NHCA is an international association of hearing conservationists from fields such as audiology, medicine, occupational health, acoustics, and research.

The InsightPersona research tool takes media literacy in political education to the next level. The AI-based analysis software identifies faces and voices in large archives in seconds. With the help of a chatbot and a semantic search, the analyzed archive can be used for research purposes. In the intuitively designed dashboard, the results can be processed to answer further questions. Journalists, teachers, publishers, software providers and those working in political education can find out more about the Fraunhofer IDMTproject at the didacta fair in Stuttgart from 11 to 15 February 2025.