What kind of options are you testing for user controls? Is the core of the tech just frequency boosts or is there fancy stuff in there as well, feedback loops or trying to interpret the sound somehow?
Do you know how people feel about their hearing aids?
Where do you see the industry going in 5-10 years?
What companies in the space look promising/exciting to you?
>What kind of options are you testing for user controls? Is the core of the tech just frequency boosts or is there fancy stuff in there as well, feedback loops or trying to interpret the sound somehow?
I used EarMachine [ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/earmachine/id732177210 ] with custom hardware in my studies. The amplification controls consist of two touchscreen wheels, one which increases the gain (with a higher rate of increase in high frequencies than in the low frequencies) and one which acts as a spectral tilt. There is a complex mapping from the two wheels to the gain, but that's the simplification. It's just traditional non-linear amplification that is applied to the input signal.
Industry labs are privately exploring all sorts of things, but they won't share publicly until their products are ready for market. The NIH has been funding the development of "open master hearing aids/simulators" to promote research into new signal processing strategies, and start-ups are pursuing new delivery models. A lot could change in just the next 2 years.
>Do you know how people feel about their hearing aids?
Every so often some market research data is published under the name MarkeTrak [ https://betterhearing.org/policy-research/marketrak/ ]. This summary is most relevant [ https://www.audiologyonline.com/articles/20q-understanding-t... ]. About 2/3rds of people who could benefit from hearing aids do not own/use them. There are a lot of reasons for that, and actual satisfaction with hearing aids is only a part. In the UK where there's no financial barrier to getting hearing aids for the vast majority of people, hearing aid adoption rates are low. Culture, social stigma, and even personality plays a huge role in how people feel about hearing aids. That's the background for this: Most hearing aid owners are satisfied. People who have hearing aids older than 6 years tend to be less satisfied than people who have new hearing aids.
>Where do you see the industry going in 5-10 years?
Broadly speaking, I expect to see a lot of experimentation and diversity in products and service delivery models. Using the principle of "the more things change, the more things stay the same", I would predict that we will see an increased focus on products and delivery models that feature greater personalization and greater integration with consumer electronics. I think we're gonna see an attempt to leverage more and different sensors on the body to modify and control device output. I think we might see some breakthroughs on noise reduction algorithms, but in the end they won't prove as useful as we'd hoped. I think Zuckerberg wants to sell a VR headset to every grandparent and great-grandparent.
>What companies in the space look promising/exciting to you?
You know I just don't have a good answer for this one. Very sorry!
