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The solution to killing off outrageously-priced hearing aids is to leverage the smartphone. It has everything that's required to make an superlative hearing aid

The solution to killing off outrageously-priced hearing aids is to leverage the smartphone. It has everything that's required to make an superlative hearing aid: excellent microphone, earphones, powerful CPU, and an all-day battery. A modern smartphone might not have a DSP but it has sufficient processing power to do the required audio processing. Many people who'd be embarrassed with visible hearing aids wouldn't mind walking around with AirPods or other visible Bluetooth earbuds these days. The hurdle is that the hearing aid manufacturers will be complaining to regulators that you can't sell a smartphone as a "medical device". The Apple AirPods with the "live listen" feature on iPhones (and iPads) is already being used by some people as a substitute hearing aid. You can use "live listen" with an actual hearing aid as well, but I've seen people using it with just AirPods and they seem to find it quite helpful. What's missing is the software to do the audio processing specific to that person's hearing loss. Plus overcoming the regulatory burden.

ashildr 7y ago
Latency.
BrentOzar 7y ago
> People who'd be embarrassed with visible hearing aids wouldn't mind walking around with AirPods or other visible Bluetooth earbuds these days. Had a relative who tried that with an app. The problem is that most folks still assume that if you've got headphones in your ears, you're listening to something else (not them.) Reactions varied from impatience (people who thought he was impolite for refusing to remove his headphones to focus on them) to anger (refusing to interact with him until he removed the headphones.)
rassibassi 7y ago
I agree that the smartphone could potentially be leveraged to do some audio processing in this context, but you have to consider the latency introduced by the forth and back over bluetooth. Not sure if such latency is a pleasent experience for the user.
GregoryPerry 7y ago
And the likely reason why this is not happening (in the commercial space at least) is FDA regulatory hurdles in having a product (and probably an entire company) shut down for making "unapproved" medical claims. I've got a set of Bose Hearphones, about $500, and which use the Bose Hear app. You can modify treble and bass but that's about it; even so if you are hard of hearing then the default iPhone sound profiles can be used to fine tune the in-ear audio and they work well as a low cost hearing aid. Same deal with my AirPods. Today Tim Cook could wave a magic wand and literally cure deafness for hard of hearing iPhone + AirPod users; ain't happening. No question Bose Hearphones with the Bose Hear app or AirPods with a complementing iPhone app could easily perform spectral analysis with an easy-to-use-equalizer, to increase and/or decrease the amplitude of specific areas of the auditory spectrum; this would be ideal for tinnitus patients and would without question put the entire hearing aid industry out of business. Current generation hearing aids are about $15 worth of analog parts that they are selling for thousands of dollars each, just by virtue of having invested in some horseshit FDA regulatory process when infinitely more capable technology has been available to hearing impaired individuals for well over two decades at this point. This is not complex, and what sucks about tinnitus is that it affects each person differently which in turn requires specific auditory tuning for each individual. But companies such as Bose or Apple that have the technology with more than sufficient computational horsepower to replace hearing aids simply refuse to do so, for whatever reasons that are likely FDA regulatory hurdle in nature. On a side note as to OP, $300 for a Teensy-based hardware platform with BT stack is f'ing outrageous, probably worse than what the actual hearing aid vendors are ripping off.
- andai 7y ago
  > specific auditory tuning I use a site called MyNoise to play nature sounds to drown out background noise (neighbors, traffic). The thing that sets MyNoise apart from the other ones I've tried is that it has a EQ you can tune, and specific instructions for tuning it: for each frequency range you find the lowest volume where you can still hear it. The result is a curve matched to your hearing curve -- the tuning process accounts for hearing loss and tinnitus. Now, if that curve could be combined with the "live listen" / Bose Hear... then you got yourself a hearing aid, using hardware you already own!
amelius 7y ago
The problem with AirPods is that people are not inclined to talk to people wearing them (thinking that they are listening to music, so don't want to be interrupted, etc.) I know this because in the gym half of the people wear AirPods, and I feel reluctant talking to them, even though they seem ok with it when I do. You probably don't want to give hearing-impaired people another barrier in communication.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
There are a couple of issues with this; none are dealbreakers. 1. As others have mentioned in this thread, people are reluctant to talk to people wearing earphones. Although perhaps this is less of a problem than the stigma of "hearing aids". 2. Earphones don't usually contain microphones. If you want directionality, the mikes have to be located in or on the ear, not on your phone. Some earphones do contain microphones, and they are the place to start. 3. IOS has pretty low latency in its audio channel, but Android is (or was) terrible. There were so many layers of software in the Android audio path that there was no way to process live sound without so much delay that a hearing aid wearer hearing both live and processed sound together would just hear mush. I read somewhere that Android has fixed this, but I don't know. 4. Bluetooth induces some latency into the live audio path as well. I don't know how much.
jmiskovic 7y ago
The Google's official hearing aid app works fantastically well. Latency is fairly low, and you can filter out parts of spectrum. If the phone has a decent microphone this app gives you super-hearing. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.accessibility.soundamplifier&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

ashildr 7y ago

Latency.

BrentOzar 7y ago

> People who'd be embarrassed with visible hearing aids wouldn't mind walking around with AirPods or other visible Bluetooth earbuds these days. Had a relative who tried that with an app. The problem is that most folks still assume that if you've got headphones in your ears, you're listening to something else (not them.) Reactions varied from impatience (people who thought he was impolite for refusing to remove his headphones to focus on them) to anger (refusing to interact with him until he removed the headphones.)

rassibassi 7y ago

I agree that the smartphone could potentially be leveraged to do some audio processing in this context, but you have to consider the latency introduced by the forth and back over bluetooth. Not sure if such latency is a pleasent experience for the user.

GregoryPerry 7y ago

And the likely reason why this is not happening (in the commercial space at least) is FDA regulatory hurdles in having a product (and probably an entire company) shut down for making "unapproved" medical claims. I've got a set of Bose Hearphones, about $500, and which use the Bose Hear app. You can modify treble and bass but that's about it; even so if you are hard of hearing then the default iPhone sound profiles can be used to fine tune the in-ear audio and they work well as a low cost hearing aid. Same deal with my AirPods. Today Tim Cook could wave a magic wand and literally cure deafness for hard of hearing iPhone + AirPod users; ain't happening. No question Bose Hearphones with the Bose Hear app or AirPods with a complementing iPhone app could easily perform spectral analysis with an easy-to-use-equalizer, to increase and/or decrease the amplitude of specific areas of the auditory spectrum; this would be ideal for tinnitus patients and would without question put the entire hearing aid industry out of business. Current generation hearing aids are about $15 worth of analog parts that they are selling for thousands of dollars each, just by virtue of having invested in some horseshit FDA regulatory process when infinitely more capable technology has been available to hearing impaired individuals for well over two decades at this point. This is not complex, and what sucks about tinnitus is that it affects each person differently which in turn requires specific auditory tuning for each individual. But companies such as Bose or Apple that have the technology with more than sufficient computational horsepower to replace hearing aids simply refuse to do so, for whatever reasons that are likely FDA regulatory hurdle in nature. On a side note as to OP, $300 for a Teensy-based hardware platform with BT stack is f'ing outrageous, probably worse than what the actual hearing aid vendors are ripping off.

andai 7y ago
> specific auditory tuning I use a site called MyNoise to play nature sounds to drown out background noise (neighbors, traffic). The thing that sets MyNoise apart from the other ones I've tried is that it has a EQ you can tune, and specific instructions for tuning it: for each frequency range you find the lowest volume where you can still hear it. The result is a curve matched to your hearing curve -- the tuning process accounts for hearing loss and tinnitus. Now, if that curve could be combined with the "live listen" / Bose Hear... then you got yourself a hearing aid, using hardware you already own!

amelius 7y ago

The problem with AirPods is that people are not inclined to talk to people wearing them (thinking that they are listening to music, so don't want to be interrupted, etc.) I know this because in the gym half of the people wear AirPods, and I feel reluctant talking to them, even though they seem ok with it when I do. You probably don't want to give hearing-impaired people another barrier in communication.

dreamcompiler 7y ago

There are a couple of issues with this; none are dealbreakers. 1. As others have mentioned in this thread, people are reluctant to talk to people wearing earphones. Although perhaps this is less of a problem than the stigma of "hearing aids". 2. Earphones don't usually contain microphones. If you want directionality, the mikes have to be located in or on the ear, not on your phone. Some earphones do contain microphones, and they are the place to start. 3. IOS has pretty low latency in its audio channel, but Android is (or was) terrible. There were so many layers of software in the Android audio path that there was no way to process live sound without so much delay that a hearing aid wearer hearing both live and processed sound together would just hear mush. I read somewhere that Android has fixed this, but I don't know. 4. Bluetooth induces some latency into the live audio path as well. I don't know how much.

jmiskovic 7y ago

The Google's official hearing aid app works fantastically well. Latency is fairly low, and you can filter out parts of spectrum. If the phone has a decent microphone this app gives you super-hearing. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.accessibility.soundamplifier&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...