Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids
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Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids
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Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids
#2Most hearing aids these days just boost certain frequency bands due to band-specific hearing loss. I saw a research project awhile back that was using neural networks to discern speech from background noise, and cancel the background noise. I'm hoping the feature comes to hearing aids soon!
Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids
#3Most hearing aids these days just boost certain frequency bands due to band-specific hearing loss. I saw a research project awhile back that was using neural networks to discern speech from background noise, and cancel the background noise. I'm hoping the feature comes to hearing aids soon!
Modern hearing aids have DSP chips that do various kinds of processing. (Most obviously, they are pretty good at canceling feedback, though it's still sometimes annoying when playing music.) The marketing literature for the hearing aids I bought 8 years ago claimed that they do all sorts of fancy things.
However, it's much like reading the marketing literature for a TV or a camera. There are a lot of impressive-sounding trademarked terms being thrown around about for the various ways that hearing aids improve sound quality, but without independent evaluations it's hard to tell if they are doing anything or it's just hype for pretty simple algorithms.
A case in point from the article: "The Livio AI, as the new device is called, uses tiny sensors plus, as its name suggests, artificial intelligence to selectively filter noise and focus on specific sound sources—for instance, the person across the table in a busy restaurant [...]"
My hearing aids supposedly do that too, but it's hard to tell. How much is a real improvement how much is updated buzzwords?
(Natural language translation, on the other hand, would be quite the thing, if it worked.)
"The cost is next-level, too: $2,500 to $3,000 per hearing aid or more, depending on the doctor and his or her services."
Mine cost about the same. Nothing unusual there. (Actually what is new is that prices for low-end hearing aids went down due to Costco's competition.)
Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids
#4Nice PR piece :)
We need dramatic improvement in battery capacity to put machine learning in hearing aid, it's far away
Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids
#5Nice PR piece :) We need dramatic improvement in battery capacity to put machine learning in hearing aid, it's far away
The article suggests any ML is happening in the paired smartphone, though it doesn't give details. I doubt there's enough room or cooling in the hearing aid itself, let alone battery.
Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids
#6Nice PR piece :) We need dramatic improvement in battery capacity to put machine learning in hearing aid, it's far away
The article suggests any ML is happening in the paired smartphone, though it doesn't give details. I doubt there's enough room or cooling in the hearing aid itself, let alone battery.
That can't work because of the lag of the phone to hearing aid communication
Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids
#7I really hope that Apple has a health device future in mind for the Airpods.
Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids
#8Most hearing aids these days just boost certain frequency bands due to band-specific hearing loss. I saw a research project awhile back that was using neural networks to discern speech from background noise, and cancel the background noise. I'm hoping the feature comes to hearing aids soon!
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Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article suggests any ML is happening in the paired smartphone, though it doesn't give details. I doubt there's enough room or cooling in the hearing aid itself, let alone battery.
That can't work because of the lag of the phone to hearing aid communication
It wouldn't necessarily need to be realtime - if you're using the device to build/tweak a "fingerprint" of background noise or required corrections, you could do that analysis with samples and periodically push the resulting filter profiles back to the earpiece (or something similar) after the phone has done the number crunching to generate them.
Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids
#10Most hearing aids these days just boost certain frequency bands due to band-specific hearing loss. I saw a research project awhile back that was using neural networks to discern speech from background noise, and cancel the background noise. I'm hoping the feature comes to hearing aids soon!
Modern hearing aids have DSP chips that do various kinds of processing. (Most obviously, they are pretty good at canceling feedback, though it's still sometimes annoying when playing music.) The marketing literature for the hearing aids I bought 8 years ago claimed that they do all sorts of fancy things. However, it's much like reading the marketing literature for a TV or a camera. There are a lot of impressive-sound…
For what it's worth, my last pair of digital aids were purchased circa 2011 as well, and the pair I recently (last few months) got aren't just better, they're astonishingly better. I ended up going with Phonak Audeo M's over the Starkey Livio AI's but it was a close decision. My two cents is that if you've got the inclination/resources, it might be worthwhile to pay a visit to an audiologist you trust to see what the state of the art is like.