The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a letter report to the President October 2015 titled “Aging Americans and Hearing Loss Imperative of Improved Hearing Technology” requesting that the Federal Government increase the pace of innovation related to assistive hearing devices.
As the letter report mentions, “Compared to other kinds of consumer electronics, the innovation cycle for hearing aids is slow because features such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity or a smartphone app interface are routinely found in other consumer electronics.”
Today, the hearing aid industry is highly concentrated and lacks a steady influx of new innovative companies. Following a wave of acquisitions, just six hearing-aid manufacturing companies mostly based outside of the U.S are dominant and have been for the past 15 years.
PCAST sees many opportunities for both incremental and disruptive improvements in assistive hearing technologies and thinks that these improvements would not be intrinsically expensive in a competitive market.
In the future, people could check their hearing using automated hearing tests available online or through common smart devices. Interfaces between smart devices and users could enable adaptive self-fitting in response to user needs.
Custom earbuds and configurations could be made routinely by 3D printing. Also, wirelessly integrated with smartphones and other wearable electronics, health aids called “hearables” could extend devices to become general interfaces to the cyber world.
In addition, hearables, used as interfaces to cyber-assistance generally could provide forgotten names via face recognition, offer health alerts, navigational information via GPS, and offer much more.
Assistive devices could possibly tap into much more computational power, to enable advances such as noise-source identification and cancellation, speech localization and recognition, and auditory reconstruction.
According to the University of Texas at Dallas www.utdallas.edu as announced last February, scientists at the university have been working on smartphone technology to improve hearing devices. With the support of a $522,000 two year grant from NIH, the Dallas team wants to harness the power of smartphones to help improve the quality of Hearing Assistive Devices (HAD) that includes hearing aids, cochlear implants, and personal sound amplifiers.
According to Dr. Issa Panahi, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering at UT Dallas http://ecs.utdallas.edu, “The success of the research project will open the door to the development of a wide collection of smartphone apps to be used in conjunction with hearing aid devices.”
In a move this year by FDA www.fda.gov to help the hearing impaired, the agency approved the marketing of a new hearing aid called the EarLens Contact Hearing Device that uses a laser diode and direct vibration of the eardrum to simplify sound.
The device is a combination of laser light pulses and a custom-fit device component that comes in direct contact with the eardrum. It is designed to use the patient’s own eardrum as a speaker and enables amplifications over a wider range of frequencies for some hearing impaired people.
Go to www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast/docsreport to view the letter report by PCAST sent to the President.