ARM in Your Ear: Computers, Not Hearing Aids | Hacker News Reader

ARM in Your Ear: Computers, Not Hearing Aids

superpowered.com

94 pointssharp1115 comments

I'm completely deaf in one ear (no amount of amplification will help) and severe-to-profoundly deaf in my other ear. I wear a hearing aid in that ear, and it allows me to function normally in everyday society.

In the last 5 years, we've gone from merely amplification to having digital processes for filtering out background noises, like air conditioning or traffic. My current aid has Bluetooth, which syncs directly to my phone. It's a total game-changer. I can now stream the audio directly to my ear, bypassing noisy (in both senses of the word) transfer from voice to microphone to speaker to microphone to ear.

That said, ever since digital hearing aids became a thing, I've been adamant that someday it will benefit Hearing People just as much as it benefits me -- if not more! Hearing People can take advantage of the background noise filtering, singling out specific voices in a crowded room, or having a Siri-like speak directly into your ear.

I can't wait for the technology to shrink to the point where even I can take advantage of those things, and as much as I do enjoy the headphone jack (wearing headphones means my hearing aid battery isn't drained by BT usage), I'm genuinely excited at the possibilities of having powerful computers embedded in the ears. Think Google Glass, but Google Ears instead. Exciting as hell.

I'm stoked!

That said, and let me digress for a moment, there are two major complaints that I wish Resound and Siemens and the other hearing aid manufacturers could fix, and that I hope Apple, et al, tackle when they build these devices.

First, battery life is decent, but not great. I change my batteries approximately every 5 days, and it often dies in awkward situations, like mid-phone call or when I'm in a meeting. There's a short warning period that allows me to gracefully exit the situation and replace the battery, but it's still frustrating.

And the second is water-proofing. I am completely deaf in the shower, in the pool, in the hot tub, when it's raining, while kayaking or surfing, or running through the sprinkler with my niece on a hot summer day. Swimming is one of my favorite activities, but because I can't socialize like Hearing People, it's an extremely frustrating activity, as well.

Hopefully those two problems are on the minds of the engineers building these devices, because I think those will be two of the hardest problems to solve moving forward.

There's no way consumer tech will have better battery life than your hearing aid, people want as many features as can be packed into an overnight charge since people are pretty used to that routine now. Waterproofing is the new differentiator though, so that seems likely.

If you just use wiring instead of bluetooth, you don't have a latency problem. The upcoming Pebble Core supports wired audio-out and microphone. Just strap that on your head, like I've been doing with the iPod nano, and you can talk to it (IF the Pebble Core has Android with speech recognition and text to speech).

I'm not comfortable with a 3G radio a centimeter form to my brain, perhaps 2G (Edge) is less problematic in that regard. Make it water-tight and I can use echo location underwater for navigation

I've a passionate relationship with wires, and often thinks of grabbing bluetooth earphones, do you think BT is also risky ? At least there are some BT modules that one can clip on a shirt and wire the headphone jack as usual, you're still wireless from the source.

I've made a hearing aid app for iPhone, and I have people ask me all the time why I don't support bluetooth headsets.. That extra delay BT introduces makes the experience worse, but I suppose the technology is magic to most people.

It'll be interesting to see if the AirPods have similar latency issues or with push toward Bluetooth Apple have resolved many of the latency issues (obviously low latency wireless is totally possible).

I doubt it since the air pods are just Bluetooth headphones.

I think eventually the mobile data radio is going to migrate out of these mini-tablet interfaces we call phones, and into either a wrist-watch or pocket-watch form factor, with local wireless accessories fleshing out the rest of the UX.

Thad almost certainly Apple's long term plan.

Rumours earlier this year said that they dropped plans to add a cellular radio into this year's watch due to battery concerns. Give it another year or two and they may solve it.

Then you could leave the house with nothing but a watch and wireless headphones and do various tasks from working out, listening to music, calling and messaging people, getting directions or booking an uber. No phone required.

> Now you can see why we speculate that the AirPods are similarly equipped with XNU on an ARM SoC.

Sensational speculation?

... And wrong, the Bluetooth chipsets are typically based around cortex m0 level devices... And those don't support XNU.

There is absolutely no need to put an iOS level devices in a pair of ear buds, video decoding on the other hand does need that.

Yep, my bet is that they're just expensive blue tooth ear buds.

If they would need to do any additional processing then the most logical place to do that is the phone, not the air pod.

Not if you need low-latency...

nRF52 is M4. Not that it makes a big difference if you want to run XNU.

(We build LoRa + BT + NFC radio modules for prototyping purposes at work. Nordic Semiconductor is in the same building so we got our hands on their new chips very early)

Makes me think of that 'Pilot' translator thing: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/meet-the-pilot-smart-earp...

Although I suspect they're going to be just regular bluetooth headsets as opposed to doing local audio processing. Still going to be horrendous latency to contend with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com