This is my field, more or less, though I'm on the basic research side.
Traditional hearing aid companies have no idea how large a freight train is barreling down on them in the form of Apple and Google. It's going to be a fun ride.
Traditional hearing aid companies have no idea how large a freight train is barreling down on them in the form of Apple and Google. It's going to be a fun ride.
Why not make a startup?
Waiting for large companies to innovate is like saying "I won't build the Apple II because I'd rather wait for the IBM PC to be invented".
The fact that these market leaders (IBM and DEC then, Apple and Google now) have so much power to uproot industries means that people are afraid to pursue their ideas. I don't have a full solution, but investors like Y Combinator are certainly helping.
as other commenters on this thread have noted (correctly), medtech doesn't work that way. You need a long runway, and the regulatory scene does not favor "move fast and deafen people".
Why would you want to buy anything so important from a startup? Either it'll suck or it'll be good, and if it sucks you don't want it, and if it's good, Google or FB or someone will acquihire the engineers and shut down the product.
Of course whether they'll all just getting steam-rollered by Apple/Google is another matter...
https://www.apple.com/accessibility/
While Apple is arguably ahead in the quality and features of their accessibility technology, the potential convergence of hearing aids and voice based tools means that Google, Amazon and Microsoft are certainly looking into this.
Nothing like a bit of justice.
Personally, my money is on Apple and Google squabbling over who gets to buy Cochlear, Oticon, and Starkey for their IP and regulatory know-how, and then just mopping up the floor with the rest of the players in the space.
It's already begun, actually: https://www.wired.com/story/how-apple-is-putting-voices-in-u...
Wired fundamentally does not understand how crappy CIs can be, so it's too enthusiastically reported, but I'm pretty sure this is the opening salvo.
Just curious, can you explain what you mean by CIs being crappy, or point to an existing explanation?
A healthy ear has about 3,000.
It’s more complicated than that, but in a nutshell, the fidelity with which CIs can represent the world is very limited. They work for speech, mostly, in quiet. There are simulations of what they sound like on YouTube, somewhat.
the CI users know are glad to have them, and they are, as you say, a lifeline for many. i’m glad my research ultimately contributes to better ones. we just have a long way to go.
The reality is that you have basically no pitch perception. 16 frequency bands across, say, the four octaves that music is interesting? You're lucky to discriminate half-octaves let alone semitones.
Temporal aspects of music come through alright. I suppose you could be a drummer.
Given that you get ~16 electrodes, and some greenwood-like frequency-place map along the basilar membrane, and given that the place specificity of stimulation from those electrodes is significantly larger than the width of an inner hair cell, I'm not really seeing "200 bands".
Hearing aids though could be ripe for disruption by improved computational power and large supply chain leverage. So it will be a matter of whether or not Apple/Google/ back off once they meet the intractable reality of regulatory compliance in a limited market a la their infrastructure plans.
I think it's most likely that they will buy up those medical companies for expertise, then spin off the medical device manufacturing into a new separate company or otherwise sell it off but keep the key engineers to roll into other random consumer products that are less regulated and more profitable. This is what Google has more or less done with robotics after buying basically every major robotics research company in the US a few years back.
The tech is easy and well-known. Being able to legally sell the product without getting sued? That's hard.