21–30 of 51 posts
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.
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...
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…
A bit like the need to see an optometrist to get glasses. When I was in Beijing a few years ago I went to the glasses district (basically a few buildings all in the same area that are floor-upon-floor of eye glass shops)... I was able to get a thorough exam from the salesman, and had a custom made pair of glasses in a couple hours for under $50US.
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.
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…
What needs to happen to bring the prices down is a unified prescription for hearing aids, like we have with eyeglasses. You can get your eye exam, request your prescription, and take it anywhere you want -- Costco, Zenni, or your local shop. That facilitates apples-to-apples competition.
There's nothing like that with hearing aids. Each company's aids need to be fitted with that company's software, and if you want to switch to a different brand, you need to go through the fitting process all over again. You can get a copy of your audiogram, but that doesn't capture everything that goes into a hearing aid fitting. What the manufacturers do is provide different fitting profiles for different types of losses (old-age loss, noise-induced loss, cookie bite loss, and so forth) and then tweak from there. You can't just take your profile from one manufacturer and move it to another.
For a comprehensive hearing aid prescription, you'd need to know exactly how much conductive loss you have at each critical band of hearing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_scale). Additionally, you need to know how much loudness recruitment (nonlinear increase of perceived loudness in response to linear increase of sound intensity) you have at each band. The problem is that right now, it's prohibitive to measure all that -- you'd be in the silent room pushing buttons in response to beeps for hours. I'm hoping that eventually, AI can help with that by taking over that manual work and allowing for more fine-grained audiometric data. Rather than trying to build noise cancelling, etc. into the hearing aids themselves, maybe we can provide accurate enough prescriptions so that the brain gets the information it needs to do the processing itself just like it does for a non-hearing-impaired person.
Nice 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.
So what happens in real time on the device is fairly simple.
AFAICT - someone please correct me if they know otherwise.
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 B…
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 really hope that Apple has a health device future in mind for the Airpods.
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 B…
Insurance is a joke. Every private insurance plan I've ever had, even my current otherwise decent one, has paid a total of 0% for anything HA-related. And it's not just the hearing aids themselves, it's the tests and the followups and the fittings and on and on. It really adds up. Iirc medicaid actually had decent coverage, but I wasn't paying for it at the time so I don't know have numbers.