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Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids

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Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids

#11

Post by farslan »

I'm using hearing aids for almost 8 years. This is just PR. What I'm looking for is a new company that disrupts all these companies. I've paid around $5K for one pair (Oticon) and it's just insane how much they cost.

Bose tries to break the market with their "Hearphones", which costs $500, but it's not in the same league as the current HA brands (Oticon, Phonak, Resound, Starkey, etc...). There is tons of opportunity here. Hope I see the days where I don't have to pay a fortune for a pair of hearing aids.

Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids

#12

Post by solatic »

farslan wrote: post #11

I'm using hearing aids for almost 8 years. This is just PR. What I'm looking for is a new company that disrupts all these companies. I've paid around $5K for one pair (Oticon) and it's just insane how much they cost. Bose tries to break the market with their "Hearphones", which costs $500, but it's not in the same league as the current HA brands (Oticon, Phonak, Resound, Starkey, etc...). There is tons of opportunity…

I'm convinced that the real reason why hearing aids remain so expensive is because of the need to see an audiologist. In a day and age where Shenzhen makes hardware iteration cheap for Chinese hardware companies, it makes very little sense for the hearing aids themselves to be so expensive.

I'd love to hack on mine, but I lack the hardware setup that connects the hearing aids to a computer for programming, not to mention a copy of the Noah programming utility itself. Everything is completely closed - good luck finding an audiologist who's gone far enough into software programming and the open-source world to appreciate the benefits that FOSS brings. The UX shouldn't be so complicated - instead of the frequency-oriented UX that Noah presents to an audiologist userbase (which is well familiar with the underlying science and has an interest in working quickly and efficiently so as to proceed to their next patient appointment), have a more optician-inspired UX, which plays a sound or speech track and asks you questions like "does this track or this other track sound better to you?" and "does this sound too quiet or too loud?" over and over again until the end user "dials in" the right fit.

Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids

#15

Post by pkaye »

solatic wrote: post #12
farslan wrote: post #11

I'm using hearing aids for almost 8 years. This is just PR. What I'm looking for is a new company that disrupts all these companies. I've paid around $5K for one pair (Oticon) and it's just insane how much they cost. Bose tries to break the market with their "Hearphones", which costs $500, but it's not in the same league as the current HA brands (Oticon, Phonak, Resound, Starkey, etc...). There is tons of opportunity…

I'm convinced that the real reason why hearing aids remain so expensive is because of the need to see an audiologist. In a day and age where Shenzhen makes hardware iteration cheap for Chinese hardware companies, it makes very little sense for the hearing aids themselves to be so expensive. I'd love to hack on mine, but I lack the hardware setup that connects the hearing aids to a computer for programming, not to men…

> I'm convinced that the real reason why hearing aids remain so expensive is because of the need to see an audiologist.

That might change in 2020 in the US because some laws have been enacted that will allow some hearing aids (for mild hearing loss?) to be sold directly to the customer.

Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids

#16

Post by bradyd »

netman21 wrote: post #14

Wow the guy admits that hearing aids were inexpensive and simple while they charged $2,500 for them. I want super hearing and I want to control it from my phone. Waiting on Silicon Valley or China to make it happen.

Check out Bose Hearphones. Not cheap at $499, but less than $2,500.

https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/wellness/conversation_en...

Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids

#17

Post by wl »

volkadav wrote: post #10
skybrian wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What pushed you over the edge to the Audeo?

Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids

#18

Post by josh2600 »

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whisper-3

Whisper is trying to do this. It's a super hard problem space to work on (for a variety of reasons, most notably power constraints for in-ear/near-ear devices). You just need more cycles per second to do higher resolution fourier transforms.

Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids

#19

Post by yeahitslikethat »

netman21 wrote: post #14

Wow the guy admits that hearing aids were inexpensive and simple while they charged $2,500 for them. I want super hearing and I want to control it from my phone. Waiting on Silicon Valley or China to make it happen.

They are expensive due to regulation as medical devices.

Re: Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids

#20

Post by pugworthy »

farslan wrote: post #11

I'm using hearing aids for almost 8 years. This is just PR. What I'm looking for is a new company that disrupts all these companies. I've paid around $5K for one pair (Oticon) and it's just insane how much they cost. Bose tries to break the market with their "Hearphones", which costs $500, but it's not in the same league as the current HA brands (Oticon, Phonak, Resound, Starkey, etc...). There is tons of opportunity…

Fellow HA wearer here - close on 25 years now. I agree that disruption in manufacturing is important, but I also think there are a few other areas that could use disruption.

First, remove the stigma of hearing aids and hearing loss. It's not an old person's thing, and it's not something you have to hide. For me, they are glasses for my ears. That cost thousands of dollars. I want options. I want colors. I want "Ray Ban" to brand hearing aids. I do not want to browse a selection of colors that are clearly meant to either blend with my skin color or my hair color. Don't market to me that they are "hardly visible" as if I should be ashamed of them and hide them.

Second, make insurance work better. For a time, I had a state job, and the state insurance would pay $200 per hearing aid. That's nowhere close to the cost - probably about 10% of the cost. $200 gets you a cheap "hearing device" you'd get out of the back of an AARP magazine with pictures of silver haired people. In my current job (Fortune 50 company), they will pay 90% of the cost for hearing aids, but they will only buy me one pair in my life time. IN MY LIFE TIME. Utterly ridiculous. I could lose one or have one damaged, and be on my own for the $2500-3500 (each) replacement cost depending on what I got.

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