But a Dutch company is now selling elegant and sophisticated ''hearing-glasses," eyeglass frames with built-in sensor arrays that may do a better job than ordinary hearing aids.

Each pair of the retro-style Varibel (www.varibel.nl) eyeglass frames, designed at the Delft University of Technology, has four tiny, interconnected microphones along each arm. The microphones intensify sounds coming from the front -- we tend to face the people we are talking to -- while dampening surrounding sounds, says Delft senior scientist Rinus Boone. A processor behind each ear transmits a composite sound to a loudspeaker inside the ear. (This processor-to-loudspeaker connection may be made wireless in the future.)

Ordinary hearing aids have difficulty isolating speech in noisy situations, Boone said. Even your companion's voice, reflected off the walls, can interfere with your conversation. By weighting the sounds according to the direction the wearer is facing, the Varibel hearing-glasses provide a more natural experience, Boone said.

The hearing-glasses come in different color schemes, so you will be turning heads for your sense of style, not the hardware sticking out of your ears. They only recently became available in the Netherlands; no US release date has been set.

Prototypes
Authenticating your meds
Among the many horrors of the counterfeit drug business are the conditions in which phony medications are made. In Boston recently, Dr. In K. Mun displayed a photograph of a counterfeit drug laboratory. The place looked like a meth lab -- the kind you see on ''Cops."

Mun, director of the Aventura Hospital and Medical Center in South Florida, was discussing the concept of ''e-pedigree": Government officials and pharmaceutical companies plan to track drugs electronically to prevent bogus products from getting into the supply chain. Using radio tags and readers, a pill bottle's history could be authenticated from the assembly line to the point where your pharmacist passes your drugs over the counter.

Kurve Technology (www.kurvetech.com) is hoping to cash in on the idea. Its ViaNase device delivers drugs through membranes inside the nose. ViaNase can administer lower doses of some drugs more efficiently than other devices and pills, and causes fewer side effects, Kurve says.

Mobile Gaming
Way cooler controls for wireless play
Sure, you're kicking all kinds of samurai butt on your cellphone, but have you considered what that mortal combat is doing to your thumbs?

Try spreading out with the MPlay (www.mobilechaos.net), a new controller that snaps onto your phone, effectively adding buttons to the sides of its keypad, for playing Brew and Java games.

MPlay currently supports a handful of Samsung, Motorola, and Audiovox phones, and one Kyocera model.

But USA Wireless Solutions, which is distributing the MPlay, hopes to announce broader support in time for its June release.

The goal ''is to expand our phone compatibility to as many CDMA-based, USB data connection phones as we can," said USA Wireless vice president Scott Vance.

By Mark Baard
http://www.boston.com/business/personaltech/articles/2006/04/17/frames_with_baked_in_hearing_aids/