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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

#81

Post by darkmoney007 »

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…

DIY Hearing Aids is on the rise because of this.

It's more accessible now than before.

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

#82

Post by dhosek »

mdw wrote: post #67
DanBC wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As an adult, I want a brightly colored hearing aid. I don't care about hiding my disability—in fact I'd rather it be difficult for others to ignore—and I want it to be easy to find if my kids knock one out of my ears which happens less now that they're six but still happens.

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

#83

Post by vpribish »

here's a more detailed write-up including pictures of the device:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

It's a crude, bulky, ugly, and fragile thing and the $1 price is not realistic - but it would be less than $10. It seems like a decent product for the poorest places - which is their goal.

The hearing aid biz in the US is glaringly inefficient and obviously ripe for disruption - but this product will not do it here. There's definitely a demand for hearing aids in the couple-of-hundred dollar range that doesn't require audiologist visits and insurance hassle - but the entrenched interests will not help bring it about.

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

#84

Post by pontus »

With all the advances in tech, why does it seem that hearing aids are still from the 80s?

I guess ultimately you're limited by your interface to the brain (something maybe neuralink could address?), but even still shouldn't there be some "magic" machine learning stuff going on in this space? Not at all an expert in audio processing, but I would imagine that we could do a decent job distinguishing voices from background noise, automatically thresholding sound in different environments, and possibly modulating sounds into different frequency bands when there are e.g. multiple speakers.

For all I know, stuff like this is already going on.

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

#85

Post by snegu »

patorjk wrote: post #46

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).

Are any of these supposed to work on congenital hearing loss, or only when hearing loss is caused by damage/age?

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

#86

Post by dhosek »

brento wrote: post #18

I was told I could benefit from hearing aids, but was told they would cost $5K to $8K depending on which ones I wanted. I've decided for now that I'll put up with the issues associated with not having them for now. I was also told they blue tooth doesn't work very well if you have an android phone, so I'm hoping that there can be some real innovation and competition in this space to drive the prices down and also imp…

That seems really high. I have the fanciest hearing aids that Costco sells (rechargeable, Bluetooth, optional external microphone) and I spent under $5K on it.

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

#87

Post by Snitch-Thursday »

TL;DR: someone could make bank selling This is semi OT. I use a hearing aid every day. the hearing aid features are turned off, i just use it for bluetooth streaming and phone conversations. it is a receiver in canal hearing aid, and I've put a non-occluding ear dome on it so I can hear normally with it in, but when I play music, the music just arrives in my ear. its also very discrete, people dont notice it unless i tell them its there.

Why someone doesn't take a cheap android/iphone bluetooth-compatible receiver in canal hearing aid and sell it not as a certified hearing device (heck, disable the hearing aid part in sw) but as a discrete wireless headphone set is a mystery to me.

Wireless headphones give me earaches with pressure on my ear canal, over the ear headphones give me headaches with pressure on my ears, then glasses, then skull. Custom in-ear monitors conform to my ears just fine but block out most other sound and have wires to deal with.

These? I put them in, forget about them for a long time, and have sound just floating into my ears when I turn on music.

It's my go-to startup idea.

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

#88

Post by red_hare »

pontus wrote: post #84

With all the advances in tech, why does it seem that hearing aids are still from the 80s? I guess ultimately you're limited by your interface to the brain (something maybe neuralink could address?), but even still shouldn't there be some "magic" machine learning stuff going on in this space? Not at all an expert in audio processing, but I would imagine that we could do a decent job distinguishing voices from backgrou…

My mother, who's fully deaf in one year and mostly deaf in the other, has heavily depended on strong and expensive hearing aids her whole life.

Over the years her hearing aids have improved in battery life, gotten smaller, and improved in things like filtering background noise. Every new hearing aid would start by sounding distorted and weird but her brain adapts to the new sounds after a couple of weeks.

The single largest life improvement I've seen for her was about 10 year ago when she could finally get a hearing aid with bluetooth. Suddenly she didn't have to decide between the "whistling" (feedback) or not hearing to talk on the phone. We got her an iPad and she stopped watching TV almost entirely and now watches YouTube and Netflix. And she can do her yoga over Skype.

Her biggest challenge, at this point, isn't a hearing aid problem but a bluetooh one. Her iPhone inconstantly switches between her hearing aid and her Volkswagen (pre-CarPlay).

I agree hearing aids are stuck in the past, but I'm also convinced most of the problems are lower hanging fruit than a neuralink :).

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

#89

Post by skybrian »

pontus wrote: post #84

With all the advances in tech, why does it seem that hearing aids are still from the 80s? I guess ultimately you're limited by your interface to the brain (something maybe neuralink could address?), but even still shouldn't there be some "magic" machine learning stuff going on in this space? Not at all an expert in audio processing, but I would imagine that we could do a decent job distinguishing voices from backgrou…

These days they are fairly sophisticated; my hearing aids will automatically switch between several different programs depending on the environment. (It doesn't work how I'd like it to, though, so I have a program that I manually set for music.) There is also a phone app for adjusting settings, though it's limited and buggy.

It's difficult to evaluate hearing aids because they are proprietary. Reading about the features in a brochure for a hearing aid is like reading the features for a TV set or stereo. Who knows what those trademarked terms really mean when it comes to how the code works?

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

#90

Post by tobtoh »

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…

I'm about to trial a replacement for my current HA (about 5 years old) for the Phonak Paradise (the just released successor to the Marvel). The bluetooth connectivity has been a big reason why I want to upgrade - the work from home situation this year with constant phone calls and Zoom meeting requiring headsets has been a constant annoyance.

I use an Airpod in my right ear and leave one HA in my left for those situations - but its fiddly and annoying to keep switching things in and out. The new IOS14 feature where I can tailor the Airpod audio response to my hearing frequency loss is simply amazing! However, being able to connect/stream audio directly to my HA will be even better.

They are seriously pricey though - cheapest model is Aus$2700 (US$2000) and the top line model is Aus$8400 (US$5900). However, given I feel I got made redundant from a previous job five years ago due to my hearing loss (1), I'll basically spend 'whatever' to ensure I can hear as easily as possible.

(1) In that job, I was wondering why as the years went on, I felt like I was struggling to pickup new concepts or get a handle on projects as fast as I used to. I seriously felt like I was getting stupider. After I got my hearing aids, I realised how much speech I was missing - I was heavily relying on lip reading and also using the context of conversation to fill in the gaps of words I couldn't hear. Which is passable in general conversation - but when managing new projects or new technology concepts, you don't have the experience to generate the context that fills in the gaps. It was literally life-changing when I got my HA. Go an get your hearing tested if you ever feel you are even remotely struggling with your hearing!

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