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The horror and disturbance caused by your colleague sitting nearby or a co-passenger on a train or bus  shouting loudly next time you come across a loudmouth yammering away into a cell phone at top volume should be a thing of past soon, thanks to  researchers working on a mobile  phone that could put an end to “volume control challenged” people.

The lip-reading phone needs nine electrodes to be   stuck to a person’s face which would then  allow  the person to silently mouth their words which through a technique called electromyography detects the electrical signals from muscles which are then passed to a device which records and amplifies them before transmitting the signal via Bluetooth to a laptop.

Professor Tanja Shultz of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology who is displaying the device at the Cebit electronics fair in Germany was inspired by the constant cell phone chatter of the person sitting next to him during a  train journey.

However,  but the electrode-heavy prototype seems unlikely to catch on anytime soon.