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$1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

sciencemag.org

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Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#61

Post by tyingq »

kube-system wrote: post #60
dekhn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read enough of Nature and Science you will realize that skilled scientists are practiced in the art of misrepresenting many details of their work to get published. Note that the pricing in there is organized around the idea of a very massive custom purchase by a large company.

I don't think there's anything wrong with them citing volume pricing per se. You'd expect something like a hearing aid to be mass produced. It's the incongruency of the materials listed with the actual materials that would be used in a mass production scenario that I find unscrupulous.

You can find plenty of these "personal amplifier" devices for $15 or so. I doubt they are making $14 on each one.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#62

Post by jononor »

anamexis wrote: post #31
jononor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck sourcing 3d-printed casings at 0.06 USD, or PCB at 0.05 USD a piece, even in 10k or higher scale. And of course in addition to the BOM comes production costs.

The casing is just a rectangular plastic box with some holes in it, I'm sure you could get some made at that price. Even if the PCB costs 5x the quoted price, you're still rounding down to $1. That said, I have no idea what production costs are for something like this.

The casing is about 2 hours 3d-printing a piece. That is 20'000 printer hours for 10k units, giving a machine-time cost of 0.025 USD (including plastic). That is off by a factor of 10-100, at least.

For injection molding, one would need to make the molds. That would cost probably more than 1000 USD, excluding engineering costs (the design is not injection molding ready). Amortizing the mold costs over 10k units alone would be 0.1 USD per unit. Then comes actually making the parts. Maybe 0.5 USD is doable.

I checked an off-the-shelf casing (no custom molds needed) it was quoted at 0.20 USD at 1K units - but this then needs to be CNC machined on 2 sides to add the necessary openings. Probably 1 USD a piece, at the least.

The costs in the scientific article does make any sense. It is really sad to see that it gets through peer review so easily... I mean OK that the scientist does not really know what things cost to produce, but then they need to consult someone who does! Ask a manufacturing or even a design house for a cost estimate. Quality check your numbers at least a little bit.

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#63

Post by jononor »

anamexis wrote: post #31
jononor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck sourcing 3d-printed casings at 0.06 USD, or PCB at 0.05 USD a piece, even in 10k or higher scale. And of course in addition to the BOM comes production costs.

The casing is just a rectangular plastic box with some holes in it, I'm sure you could get some made at that price. Even if the PCB costs 5x the quoted price, you're still rounding down to $1. That said, I have no idea what production costs are for something like this.

I would estimate the PCB costs, excluding Assembly time, to be 10x the quoted price.

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#64

Post by [deleted] »

tyingq wrote: post #61
kube-system wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's anything wrong with them citing volume pricing per se. You'd expect something like a hearing aid to be mass produced. It's the incongruency of the materials listed with the actual materials that would be used in a mass production scenario that I find unscrupulous.

You can find plenty of these "personal amplifier" devices for $15 or so. I doubt they are making $14 on each one. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...

[deleted]

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#65

Post by GuB-42 »

ritchiea wrote: post #10

Too bad we live in the kind of world where the biggest hearing aid manufacturer will read this, raise additional capital, buy the patent & rights to the $1 hearing aid and then sell hearing aids for $5,000 each they'll bill to medicare and big health insurance co.

Patent this? This is just a microphone, an amplifier and a headphone jack. That's the most obvious thing.

There is no real innovation here. The work being done here is closer to a market research: find the cheapest components that do the job.

Cheap is also its only quality. $5000 hearing aids are better in every other aspect. It makes no sense for big hearing aid manufacturers to use anything about this design.

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#66

Post by [deleted] »

madspindel wrote: post #36
rini17 wrote: post #7

Hearing aids (nor cochlear implants, for that matter) do not "restore hearing", except for light hearing loss. They are only like crutches (not even wheelchair). For example, to follow conversations or phone/skype with multiple people is very exhausting even with fancy device, because in most cases the "bandwidth" to the brain just isn't available. That said, the hearing aids vendor lock-in is really atrocious and ca…

It's because it's a medical device. The OTC Hearing Aid Act will change that so Bose (and I would guess Samsung and Apple in the future) can sell hearing aids directly to consumers. Bluetooth 5.2 LE Audio will solve the vendor lock-in. So the future looks bright for us with hearing loss. Edit: And with iOS 14 you can use AirPods Pro as hearings aids by adding an audiogram to the Apple Health app. Works really well.

[deleted]

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#67

Post by mdw »

DanBC wrote: post #44
loa_in_ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the precious volume and heat - the technology still seems very unimpressive given we have wireless earbuds in stores. Mounting something behind the ear doesn't seem very extravagant these days and vendors only profit from this forced conservative approach because it smothers any potential competition that thinks it has to be this way.

Yes. Plenty of people prefer behind the ear devices because they are either rechargable, or brightly coloured. Young people in particular benefit from being able to chose an aid that's brightly coloured, and you see some YP modify their aids with skins or stickers. Here's the colour range for one modern aid: https://www.fmhearingsystems.co.uk/PDF/FocusColours.jpg Rechargable: https://www.phonak.com/uk/en/about-us/rec…

Having a brightly coloured hearing aid as an adult doesn’t look professional. Are these marketed towards younger people?

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#68

Post by [deleted] »

rini17 wrote: post #7

Hearing aids (nor cochlear implants, for that matter) do not "restore hearing", except for light hearing loss. They are only like crutches (not even wheelchair). For example, to follow conversations or phone/skype with multiple people is very exhausting even with fancy device, because in most cases the "bandwidth" to the brain just isn't available. That said, the hearing aids vendor lock-in is really atrocious and ca…

[deleted]

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#69

Post by otoburb »

SeasonalEnnui wrote: post #33
rini17 wrote: post #7

Hearing aids (nor cochlear implants, for that matter) do not "restore hearing", except for light hearing loss. They are only like crutches (not even wheelchair). For example, to follow conversations or phone/skype with multiple people is very exhausting even with fancy device, because in most cases the "bandwidth" to the brain just isn't available. That said, the hearing aids vendor lock-in is really atrocious and ca…

Multiple-decades of hearing aid wearing here. I agree with most of that. I ended up buying the programmer for my aids to do small tweaks (not the prescription/audiogram, just the program configuration where you can edit the level of DSP in various situations). I would say that this latest generation of hearing aids (Phonak Marvel) is the first generation where I've felt like they've got it right. Direct bluetooth con…

And the Phonak Marvel's retail price is north of $1,000 USD. Can some of the cost to the individual be defrayed through medical insurance in the US?

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#70

Post by Someone »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #48
csunbird wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it possible to use the users phone for those calculations ? Think about a dumb hearing aid, with a microphone and bluetooth connection, which is able to connect to any compatible phone and phone does the processing.

Realtime audio is tricky without hardware acceleration.

A recent smartphone has enough hardware for that, I would think, and if it hasn’t, but the idea made sense, it would be added. If the hardware can power a GPU and a million-pixel display, it can power quite a beefy DSP, too.

I would worry about the latency of a round-trip over Bluetooth. Google search tells me it’s, optimistically, 100ms single-trip, so 200ms round trip (https://www.headphonesty.com/2020/07/fix-sound-delay-bluetoo...)

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