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Here's the organization building this thing: https://shop.tympan.org/
I'm kinda excited about the four microphone board, where you can subtract the ambient noise behind the listener from the noise in the direction they're facing.
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Damn that link made me happy. Was wondering if anyone has done to hearing aids what they did for glasses. We just brought my father progressive glasses for 100usd (would be 400+usd here at a 'normal' store). Now he needs a hearing aid and we're dreading the multi-hundred payment on top of what is covered with insurance for a basic device. So.. What's the catch with these cheap hearing aids? Why would we not buy these…
I just got myself some Costco Signature hearing aids a month ago. Its $1499/pair. Its made by a major manufacturer named Phonak. The feature set is close to their top of the line model. Half the cost of the hearing aids in the US is actually the fitting by the audiologist and they have to pay for their expenses. You have to spend considerable time with the audiologist to measure, fit and calibrate the device to your…
As an aside, there's a lot of exciting regenerative work going on related to hearing at the moment. Sometime soon we may no longer need hearing aids. There are some neat drugs either in clinical trials or about to begin clinical trials that will re-grow hair cells and broken synapses in the cochlea (ex: FX-322, OTO-413, OTO-6XX).
Stefan Heller from Stanford's lab had set a goal somewhere around in 2010 to cure hearing loss by 2020 by trying to convert stem cells to hair cells. I have never heard of any breakthrough. I hope this happens in 10 more years at least.
I never wrote part 2 of this blog post, but there's a $300 open source hearing aid that can do way more than most hearing aids: https://shapr.github.io/posts/2019-08-03-tympan.html Here's the organization building this thing: https://shop.tympan.org/ I'm kinda excited about the four microphone board, where you can subtract the ambient noise behind the listener from the noise in the direction they're facing.
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Stefan Heller from Stanford's lab had set a goal somewhere around in 2010 to cure hearing loss by 2020 by trying to convert stem cells to hair cells. I have never heard of any breakthrough. I hope this happens in 10 more years at least.
This is similar to how Frequency's FX-322 drug works. It stimulates progenitor cells [1] within the cochlea to divide and form new hair cells. From what I've read, progenitor cells are basically one step away from a stem cell. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progenitor_cell
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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.
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Cochlear implants do not "restore hearing" but they do allow people who are completely deaf to sense sound well enough to understand speech. That's a huge change in a deaf person's life.
> to sense sound well enough My understanding is that it's like a low-sighted person being able to see contrasts and outlines of things. It's enough to differentiate things, but significantly less than the detail of regular ability.
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Apple already sells a hearing aid that they can’t legally call ‘hearing aid’. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209082 : “With Live Listen, your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch can act like a microphone that sends sound to your AirPods or Powerbeats Pro. Live Listen can help you hear a conversation in a noisy area or even hear someone speaking across the room.” It even supports hearing aids (a few? Some? Many? The most p…
Unfortunately live listen is more like a replacement for remote microphones, not the hearing aids themselves. It adds around 70ms latency with a bluetooth headset. This is enough to be very uncomfortable. For comparison, most hearing aids on the market today have around 8ms of end to end latency. Source: I've built a hearing aid and done extensive latency tests :)
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quality? doesn't this question apply to every cheap Chinese product? My mom has had poor hearing for decades and always spent thousands on her hearing aids for marginal improvements in quality (e.g. noise cancelling, size, noticeability). The only thing that really made a big improvement was when she finally got a cochlear implant.
> doesn't this question apply to every cheap Chinese product? The question is always valid but the answer isn't always the same. I'm thinking specifically of cheap eyeglasses.I've had nothing but good experiences buying glasses that cost 10-20% of what I would pay from a local store.
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…
I work on ecommerce, so I often see trendy products being marketed: usually sourced from China and hyped to sell at 20-50x its price. I am trying to see how different this device is compared to sound amplifiers marketed as 'miracle hearing aids' found in any ecommerce site. The last thing HN wants is to fall victim to an advertorial disguised as a scientific discovery. Note: I worked for a company that wrote 'scienti…