41–50 of 53 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hypothetically could one go to Taiwan and buy a pair while on vacation? Asking for a friend…
You could probably find a company or a person in Taiwan to ship them to you from Taiwan.
Not sure but can mention some challenges: - The power budget of a traditional HA is ~1mW and operate on ~1V. Existing vendors use custom silicon with sub-threshold designs to hit this. I see this as one of their largest moats. Lipo rechargeable wearables work around this problem. - Customers for your product want their hearing back, and that's not something HAs realistically provide. So selling them is pretty weird a…
Let's not forget the rigor it must stand up to (water, wax, sweat, heat, temp differentials, dead skin buildup, etc.).
In the early days you need to bring together a group of people with a diverse set of skills --- mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, firmware engineers, audio engineers, regulatory specialists, people with experience working with factories, along with ML engineers in our case. You need a lot more people to bring a product to market than if you're building another SaaS company. (And, of course, all your code is running on a chip that has to be small enough to fit behind their ear.) Then hardware startups also have a problem that they tend to have slower growth and lower margins than successful software startups. So later stage VCs are more inclined to invest in software startups.
Hearing aids are also unique in that they require a lot of tuning to get the audio to sound as natural as possible. There are dozens of algorithms that process different features of the audio, things like wind noise reduction and feedback cancellation, and some of them can be a bit finicky. Companies like Oticon or Widex have hundreds of engineers who have been tuning these algorithms for decades. (Another advantage the big guys have is that they can make custom silicon So if you want a top of the line hearing aid the bar is very high. Then until recently there were big barriers to entry on the sales side --- you weren't selling just to the customer, you were also selling to the audiologist, and many audiologists have incentives to (mostly) sell a single brand. This is less of a barrier now with the recent changes to allow hearing aids to be sold over-the-counter.
I do hope to see another startup give it a go because I still think there's room for disruption --- the big companies move a lot slower than a startup can, and the ODML space is developing very, very quickly. But it's not a project for the faint of heart.
Hello, my name is Blue. I am also severely hearing loss. We have developed hearing aids, but we are currently only sold in Taiwan. Other countries will start selling them this year(FDA approved). If you are interested, you can follow otoadd ( https://otoadd.com/index-en.html )
Most hearing aid vendors and audiologists don't seem to make much of an effort on this, so I usually switch to Airpods for better sound.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not quite the same, many people with hearing loss only lose hearing on part of the spectrum, so it’s not just about making things louder, it’s about making the specific frequencies louder in ratio to the loudness of the noise.
I am very ignorant about this, but couldn’t this be solved with a config where you specify “hearing loss at these frequencies at these levels” and then the headphones increase/decrease this frequencies in response? Obviously, there needs to be a standard, and hw that listens to the standard.
Most startups are not technical problems. Hearing aids are no different. There is a stigma with hearing aids. You have to get over both the internal ego and the external stigma. For many people, that means admitting they're aging and "need help". Frankly, it really doesn't matter how amazing the hardware is. That's just an incredibly challenging problem to overcome.
Nobody cares when I wear AirPods all over the place, they actually (almost) work like hearing aids and definitely could with some software tweaks alone, even more so with minor hardware tweaks. Get somebody to design hearing aids that are meant to be noticed instead of badly hidden.
Or do people just talk more loudly at you since they don’t know how well you can hear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody cares when I wear AirPods all over the place, they actually (almost) work like hearing aids and definitely could with some software tweaks alone, even more so with minor hardware tweaks. Get somebody to design hearing aids that are meant to be noticed instead of badly hidden.
When you talk to people, do you take your AirPods out? Or do people just talk more loudly at you since they don’t know how well you can hear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you talk to people, do you take your AirPods out? Or do people just talk more loudly at you since they don’t know how well you can hear.
I don't mean to say I leave my airpods in when I'm having a conversation with a person, but for example walking to the grocery store and checking out. People don't seem to notice, or if they do they don't act in any way other than normal.
The stigma is in conversations...