5 ms·
I’d take issue with “not complicated.” They are very tiny, have to be very low power, and they run a surprising amount of real-time DSP. Then the whole electron
by patentatt 8y ago
I’d take issue with “not complicated.” They are very tiny, have to be very low power, and they run a surprising amount of real-time DSP. Then the whole electronics package has to be integrated with an acoustics package including multiple microphones and transducers. And the higher quality all of those acoustical components are, the more transparent the end product. And it all has to be durable enough for continuous wear by a human for multiple years. I wouldn’t diminish what cutting edge hearing aides do, they can be quite impressive technically.
- abecedarius 8y agoI doubt the size constraint is pressing (as modern electronics go) unless you're trying to hide them. My decades-old high-power analog aids fit behind the ear.
- skybrian 8y agoPower constraints seem pretty tight, though. Modern hearing aids have radios in them for continuously sending audio data between the left and right sides, and they run for a week on a hearing aid battery.
- bluGill 8y agoHearing aids are sold to hunters at a much lower price (as noise protection and low noise enhancement). The same work goes into them, but they are not medical devices so they have to be affordable.
- burntwater 8y agoThose hearing aids aren't even remotely close to the $3,000 hearing aids a full-time wearer uses. It's kind of like comparing a free solar-powered swag calculator to a TI-84 graphing calculator. Although, much like the TI-84, $3,000 hearing aids probably are overpriced.
- malikolivier 8y agoComparing these two types of hearing aids is similar to comparing a magnifying glass with normal glasses. A magnifying glass might do the job good enough, and I know people who decided to not buy glasses but just use a magnifying glass to read.
- ghaff 8y agoOr, if your eyes are roughly equivalent in prescription need, you buy a $10 pair of reading glasses at any drug store.
- mr_custard 8y agoThis is true - the modern devices with real-time DSP _are_ amazing. I strongly suspect that the eye-watering prices are still massively overblown, though.
- kstrauser 8y agoI ask seriously: could this be replicated with AirPods and an iPhone, in software?
- burntwater 8y agoI vaguely recall hearing about some work on this front. I suspect however that latency may be an issue.
- repiret 8y agoThe latency between the AirPods and the iPhone is too high for the iPhone to do any of the real-time work. I have no idea if the AirPods have a DSP that would be able to do that work. But cheap, small, low power DSPs can do an amazing amount of work these days. Even if the AirPods don't have such a DSP, they're a good example of a reasonably complex piece of electronics with speakers and a microphone that sits in your ear, but costs an order of magnitude less than hearing aids. I think they're a good datapoint to argue that a truly free market could make much cheaper hearing aids.
- greedo 8y agohttps://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/20/how-to-turn-airpods-into-hearing-aids.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/20/how-to-turn-airpods-into-hea...
- _carl_jung 8y agoEverything you described would be impressive if this were 1980.