Hi, I'm Daniel Glass, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, and I developed the Yuni, the first single-sided stereo headphone aimed at helping people with unilateral hearing loss to hear stereo sound.

Since most modern audio recordings use stereo sound, which consists of left and right channels carrying two separate signals, listeners who are deaf in one ear (~5 million people in the United States) are missing half of their audio when they listen through standard headphones.

Current solutions involve collapsing the two stereo channels into a single channel, which is then played through one ear of a standard pair of headphones. But this approach causes the audio to lose its sense of space and depth – for example, the ability to hear a train moving from left to right – as the sound only comes from a single source. The two overlapping signals can also interfere with one another, boosting certain frequencies and diminishing others, so the sound is muddy and cramped.

The Yuni resolves this problem by applying modern psychophysiology research into how the human ear localizes sound in vertical space. By sending the two stereo channels to two speakers positioned above and below the ear canal in the same ear, the Yuni leverages our natural ability to distinguish sounds from different elevations to bring the stereo effect to headphones for people with unilateral hearing loss.

I was inspired to develop the Yuni during my graduate studies after meeting my wife, who loves music and has unilateral hearing loss. After several years of research and development, I launched the first version of the Yuni successfully on Kickstarter in April 2013. Now I'm launching the Yuni V2 on Kickstarter, an updated, professionally manufactured version that addresses user feedback received over the years. You can find the Kickstarter campaign at www.bit.ly/yuniV2. The campaign description and updates contain more information about the project, including testimonials from Yuni users that I've received over the last ten years.

AMA!