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Not an audiologist, but an engineer/musician with some mild hearing loss and some interest in these things. What needs to happen to bring the prices down is a

Not an audiologist, but an engineer/musician with some mild hearing loss and some interest in these things. What needs to happen to bring the prices down is a unified prescription for hearing aids, like we have with eyeglasses. You can get your eye exam, request your prescription, and take it anywhere you want -- Costco, Zenni, or your local shop. That facilitates apples-to-apples competition. There's nothing like that with hearing aids. Each company's aids need to be fitted with that company's software, and if you want to switch to a different brand, you need to go through the fitting process all over again. You can get a copy of your audiogram, but that doesn't capture everything that goes into a hearing aid fitting. What the manufacturers do is provide different fitting profiles for different types of losses (old-age loss, noise-induced loss, cookie bite loss, and so forth) and then tweak from there. You can't just take your profile from one manufacturer and move it to another. For a comprehensive hearing aid prescription, you'd need to know exactly how much conductive loss you have at each critical band of hearing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_scale). Additionally, you need to know how much loudness recruitment (nonlinear increase of perceived loudness in response to linear increase of sound intensity) you have at each band. The problem is that right now, it's prohibitive to measure all that -- you'd be in the silent room pushing buttons in response to beeps for hours. I'm hoping that eventually, AI can help with that by taking over that manual work and allowing for more fine-grained audiometric data. Rather than trying to build noise cancelling, etc. into the hearing aids themselves, maybe we can provide accurate enough prescriptions so that the brain gets the information it needs to do the processing itself just like it does for a non-hearing-impaired person.

skushch 7y ago
Just an FYI -- you can get a hearing test at Costco or you can request your results and bring them to Costco.
- biggieshellz 7y ago
  Sure, that's an audiogram. It tells you what your threshold of hearing is at a certain set of frequencies. Additionally, sometimes they'll do bone conduction, which can characterize whether your loss is conductive (for example, trouble with the bones in your inner ear) or sensorineural (for example, cochlear damage from noise exposure). But that's just a starting point for fitting a hearing aid -- it's not like a glasses prescription that tells the optometrist exactly how to cut the lens.

skushch 7y ago

Just an FYI -- you can get a hearing test at Costco or you can request your results and bring them to Costco.

biggieshellz 7y ago
Sure, that's an audiogram. It tells you what your threshold of hearing is at a certain set of frequencies. Additionally, sometimes they'll do bone conduction, which can characterize whether your loss is conductive (for example, trouble with the bones in your inner ear) or sensorineural (for example, cochlear damage from noise exposure). But that's just a starting point for fitting a hearing aid -- it's not like a glasses prescription that tells the optometrist exactly how to cut the lens.