6 ms·

Starkey and the Future of Hearing Aids

72 points by Digit-Al 7y ago

exabrial 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      What pushed you over the edge to the Audeo?
      - volkadav 7y ago
        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).
    - magissima 7y ago
      I recently made a similar upgrade (old ones from 2010-ish) and I was also impressed by how much better the new ones were. The old pair's performance may have degraded over time, but the way the new ones blew them out of the water I doubt it was just that.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pugworthy 7y ago
  Mine use low power wireless to coordinate sound amplification, and they are 4 years old. They can be a lot fancier than you're imagining - but at a price of thousands of dollars each.
gws 7y ago
Nice PR piece :) We need dramatic improvement in battery capacity to put machine learning in hearing aid, it's far away
- blacksmith_tb 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    That can't work because of the lag of the phone to hearing aid communication
    - sethhochberg 7y ago
      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.
  - crucialfelix 7y ago
    The smartphone just switches modes and adjusts the volume. AFAICT these modern hearing aids are doing something like dynamic EQ, based on frequency level detection. The programs that dynamically adjust the EQ levels are trained on test material and then the audiologist or the user can switch between programs and adjust the levels based on the user's hearing response curve. So what happens in real time on the device is fairly simple. AFAICT - someone please correct me if they know otherwise.
gvand 7y ago
I really hope that Apple has a health device future in mind for the Airpods.
- microtherion 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
farslan 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    > I'm convinced that the real reason why hearing aids remain so expensive is because of the need to see an audiologist. That might change in 2020 in the US because some laws have been enacted that will allow some hearing aids (for mild hearing loss?) to be sold directly to the customer.
  - canada_dry 7y ago
    > why hearing aids remain so expensive is because of the need to see an audiologist. A bit like the need to see an optometrist to get glasses. When I was in Beijing a few years ago I went to the glasses district (basically a few buildings all in the same area that are floor-upon-floor of eye glass shops)... I was able to get a thorough exam from the salesman, and had a custom made pair of glasses in a couple hours for under $50US.
thomasjudge 7y ago
If Doc Emmett Brown wasn't based on Bill Austin, he should have been
netman21 7y ago
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.
- bradyd 7y ago
  Check out Bose Hearphones. Not cheap at $499, but less than $2,500. https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/wellness/conversation_enhancing_headphones/hearphones.html https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/wellness/conversation_en...
  - wrycoder 7y ago
    I have used a pair of those in an extraordinarily loud bar. One of those places where you have to stand two feet away from each other and yell. I’m pretty deaf, but it was the other people asking me to repeat. I was understanding them fairly well. I get similar reports from other users.
- yeahitslikethat 7y ago
  They are expensive due to regulation as medical devices.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    So you can buy them cheaply online from low-regulation countries? Or those with broad black markets?
  - wrycoder 7y ago
    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.
josh2600 7y ago
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.
hdx 7y ago
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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
peter_d_sherman 7y ago
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...)

72 points by Digit-Al 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    What pushed you over the edge to the Audeo?
    - volkadav 7y ago
      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).
  - magissima 7y ago
    I recently made a similar upgrade (old ones from 2010-ish) and I was also impressed by how much better the new ones were. The old pair's performance may have degraded over time, but the way the new ones blew them out of the water I doubt it was just that.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pugworthy 7y ago
Mine use low power wireless to coordinate sound amplification, and they are 4 years old. They can be a lot fancier than you're imagining - but at a price of thousands of dollars each.

gws 7y ago

Nice PR piece :) We need dramatic improvement in battery capacity to put machine learning in hearing aid, it's far away

blacksmith_tb 7y ago
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 7y ago
  That can't work because of the lag of the phone to hearing aid communication
  - sethhochberg 7y ago
    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.
- crucialfelix 7y ago
  The smartphone just switches modes and adjusts the volume. AFAICT these modern hearing aids are doing something like dynamic EQ, based on frequency level detection. The programs that dynamically adjust the EQ levels are trained on test material and then the audiologist or the user can switch between programs and adjust the levels based on the user's hearing response curve. So what happens in real time on the device is fairly simple. AFAICT - someone please correct me if they know otherwise.

gvand 7y ago

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

microtherion 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

farslan 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- pkaye 7y ago
  > I'm convinced that the real reason why hearing aids remain so expensive is because of the need to see an audiologist. That might change in 2020 in the US because some laws have been enacted that will allow some hearing aids (for mild hearing loss?) to be sold directly to the customer.
- canada_dry 7y ago
  > why hearing aids remain so expensive is because of the need to see an audiologist. A bit like the need to see an optometrist to get glasses. When I was in Beijing a few years ago I went to the glasses district (basically a few buildings all in the same area that are floor-upon-floor of eye glass shops)... I was able to get a thorough exam from the salesman, and had a custom made pair of glasses in a couple hours for under $50US.

thomasjudge 7y ago

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

netman21 7y ago

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.

bradyd 7y ago
Check out Bose Hearphones. Not cheap at $499, but less than $2,500. https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/wellness/conversation_enhancing_headphones/hearphones.html https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/wellness/conversation_en...
- wrycoder 7y ago
  I have used a pair of those in an extraordinarily loud bar. One of those places where you have to stand two feet away from each other and yell. I’m pretty deaf, but it was the other people asking me to repeat. I was understanding them fairly well. I get similar reports from other users.
yeahitslikethat 7y ago
They are expensive due to regulation as medical devices.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  So you can buy them cheaply online from low-regulation countries? Or those with broad black markets?
- wrycoder 7y ago
  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.

josh2600 7y ago

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.

hdx 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

peter_d_sherman 7y ago

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...)