The social impact of a better and more affordable hearing aid would be immense. Especially since the social isolation of hearing loss takes such a devastating toll on one’s social life. And it’s there’s interesting technical challenges that have to be solved. Mainly packing as much digital signal processing onto a very low compute environment.
As someone with hearing loss, it’s sad to see promising startups like Whisper.AI leave the market. There should be dozens of hearing aid startups out there. Where are they?
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Hearing aids are regulated as medical devices, that means additional costs and delays for certification before a new device can be brought to market. Also, the target audience is limited to around 10% of the population, and most medical devices are paid for by insurance companies so anytime you add a feature for quality of life insurance companies will argue it’s not necessary and push for the cheaper version.
Also worth mentioning that you couldn’t get hearing aids over-the-counter until 2022. I think there’s room for innovation in the space now, but it’s still a new thing.
Can confirm. I work in R&D in the automotive sector, and we looked into getting into medical. There’s government regulation to handle, and (in the US) shenanigans around insurance. The technology isn’t necessarily that complicated, but the industry is.
What I’m surprised hasn’t hit the market is a “non-medical” hearing aid–i.e. a wireless earbud that has a function to amplify pass-through. Would likely be used as a hearing aid by those who can’t get/afford them, but might get to avoid the regulation and insurance hassle.