
Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids - Digit-Al
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-18/the-future-of-wearable-tech-is-called-a-hearing-aid
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farslan
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 here. Hope I see the days where
I don't have to pay a fortune for a pair of hearing aids.

~~~
solatic
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 mention a copy of the Noah
programming utility itself. Everything is completely closed - good luck
finding an audiologist who's gone far enough into software programming and the
open-source world to appreciate the benefits that FOSS brings. The UX
shouldn't be so complicated - instead of the frequency-oriented UX that Noah
presents to an audiologist userbase (which is well familiar with the
underlying science and has an interest in working quickly and efficiently so
as to proceed to their next patient appointment), have a more optician-
inspired UX, which plays a sound or speech track and asks you questions like
"does this track or this other track sound better to you?" and "does this
sound too quiet or too loud?" over and over again until the end user "dials
in" the right fit.

~~~
biggieshellz
The problem is that patients don't always know what is supposed to sound
right, especially if they've been going without hearing aids for years. If you
take a person with a high-frequency loss and correct it to the normal range,
they'll often complain that everything sounds sharp, or there are too many
noises and it's hard to concentrate. Only after wearing them for a while does
their brain learn to filter out the normal environmental sounds and adjust to
the "new normal".

~~~
solatic
Which is precisely why home self-programming is so important. It allows
patients to go back and re-program as often as they feel necessary, and such
additional tunings would not cost the patient the cost of additional
audiologist visits.

I guess the question is whether ignorance is bliss. If a patient self-sets a
hearing aid to a level that the patient thinks is great, but isn't
theoretically as great as it could be, is that actually a problem?

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exabrial
Most hearing aids these days just boost certain frequency bands due to band-
specific hearing loss. I saw a research project awhile back that was using
neural networks to discern speech from background noise, and cancel the
background noise. I'm hoping the feature comes to hearing aids soon!

~~~
skybrian
Modern hearing aids have DSP chips that do various kinds of processing. (Most
obviously, they are pretty good at canceling feedback, though it's still
sometimes annoying when playing music.) The marketing literature for the
hearing aids I bought 8 years ago claimed that they do all sorts of fancy
things.

However, it's much like reading the marketing literature for a TV or a camera.
There are a lot of impressive-sounding trademarked terms being thrown around
about for the various ways that hearing aids improve sound quality, but
without independent evaluations it's hard to tell if they are doing anything
or it's just hype for pretty simple algorithms.

A case in point from the article: "The Livio AI, as the new device is called,
uses tiny sensors plus, as its name suggests, artificial intelligence to
selectively filter noise and focus on specific sound sources—for instance, the
person across the table in a busy restaurant [...]"

My hearing aids supposedly do that too, but it's hard to tell. How much is a
real improvement how much is updated buzzwords?

(Natural language translation, on the other hand, would be quite the thing, if
it worked.)

"The cost is next-level, too: $2,500 to $3,000 per hearing aid or more,
depending on the doctor and his or her services."

Mine cost about the same. Nothing unusual there. (Actually what is new is that
prices for low-end hearing aids went down due to Costco's competition.)

~~~
volkadav
For what it's worth, my last pair of digital aids were purchased circa 2011 as
well, and the pair I recently (last few months) got aren't just better,
they're _astonishingly_ better. I ended up going with Phonak Audeo M's over
the Starkey Livio AI's but it was a close decision. My two cents is that if
you've got the inclination/resources, it might be worthwhile to pay a visit to
an audiologist you trust to see what the state of the art is like.

~~~
wl
What pushed you over the edge to the Audeo?

~~~
volkadav
The Audeo M's (are? were?) the only ones with native, in-device/streamer-less
bluetooth. They work just like bluetooth headphones/mic (used so far with:
osx, android, linux desktop) and the sound quality is outstanding. The only
minor irritant I've found so far is that you have to effectively power cycle
them to re-pair to another device (eg phone to work laptop).

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josh2600
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whisper-3](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whisper-3)

Whisper is trying to do this. It's a super hard problem space to work on (for
a variety of reasons, most notably power constraints for in-ear/near-ear
devices). You just need more cycles per second to do higher resolution fourier
transforms.

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gws
Nice PR piece :)

We need dramatic improvement in battery capacity to put machine learning in
hearing aid, it's far away

~~~
blacksmith_tb
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.

~~~
gws
That can't work because of the lag of the phone to hearing aid communication

~~~
sethhochberg
It wouldn't necessarily need to be realtime - if you're using the device to
build/tweak a "fingerprint" of background noise or required corrections, you
could do that analysis with samples and periodically push the resulting filter
profiles back to the earpiece (or something similar) after the phone has done
the number crunching to generate them.

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hdx
My $2k hearing aids got stolen when the office I worked on got burglarized
(seriously, who steals custom fit hearing aids?). I replaced them with the
$500 Bose Hearphones and haven't looked back. My hearing aids were not high
end, the only advantages it had was that it was more discreet and it's
batteries lasted a whole week, but with the Hearphones I also get noise
cancelling(love it on bart and the open office), easy access to volume
control, it's rechargeable, it connects to my phone via bluetooth so I can
listen to music, take calls, talk to Google Assistant, etc. All for 1/4 of the
price of my cheap(by hearing aid standards) hearing aid.

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gvand
I really hope that Apple has a health device future in mind for the Airpods.

~~~
microtherion
AirPods already can provide some hearing assistance in some situations through
the "Live Listen" feature: [https://www.wikihow.com/Use-Airpods-As-Hearing-
Aids](https://www.wikihow.com/Use-Airpods-As-Hearing-Aids)

~~~
ska
Yes. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the sort of direction that truly
disrupts the hearing aid industry - something that can leverage the scale on
in-demand consumer electronics to bring the cost down, but with enough DSP
capability to do interesting things. Perhaps in custom fit (or refit)
packaging for more comfort.

Doesn't have to be apple specifically, of course.

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peter_d_sherman
Star Trek's Universal Translator version .000002...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_translator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_translator)

(Arguably Alexa/Cortana/Siri/Watson -- were version .000001...)

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netman21
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.

~~~
yeahitslikethat
They are expensive due to regulation as medical devices.

~~~
wrycoder
They are expensive because of the rent-seeking cartel that adds more dubious
features while gradually raising the price. Even MDHearingAid, which started
under $500, with a stated policy of serving a wide market at a low price,
recently added one more microphone and doubled their price. They keep sending
me offers of $50 off, if I buy two. Got greedy, like the rest.

~~~
yeahitslikethat
Oh the good ol' "rent seeking cartel" meme again. Never heard that before.

Even though the same rent seeking cartel produces the same non medical hearing
loss grade devices at lower prices. Good call.

~~~
wrycoder
They preferably do not. They do defend their lower flank against the coming
disruption, e.g. via Costco. MDHearingAid is not part of the group of five,
they are a disruptor.

Until recently, the non-medical devices have been simple amplifiers, which are
technically not competitive.

Rent-seeking because they successfully lobby for Federal regulation that locks
out competition by providing a high barrier to market entry.

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thomasjudge
If Doc Emmett Brown wasn't based on Bill Austin, he should have been

