Ask HN: Why aren't there more hearing aid startups?
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?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 74.0 ms ] threadMost hearing aid vendors and audiologists don't seem to make much of an effort on this, so I usually switch to Airpods for better sound.
What about not using the US as the launch market?
Edit: I may have misread your comment, my apologies! I'm only loosely familiar with the US regulation on this matter and completely unfamiliar with other countries' regulations but I'd find it hard to believe there's any country more expensive to launch in for a medical device than the US, so for the OP I'd agree with you that the US should probably be a later market to target.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-fina...
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/08/17/2022-17...
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/explore/tech-innovation?project_ti...
There are already quite a few products in this space: Bose HearPhones Nuheara .. and many more.
TI has a useful page though:
https://www.ti.com/solution/hearing-aid
That page basically says use an all in one "MSP430F5510" MPU with "CC2640R2F" Bluetooth.
The Bluetooth audio quality is not as good as the normal amplification or a decent headset, but it is functional for listening and calls. If I had two aids I would probably care more about getting it tuned for better music listening.
That said with the recent changes allowing OTC hearing aids as of 2022 and companies like rewind.ai chasing always-on audio recording I imagine we'll see some interesting innovations in this space over the next few years.
There is a stigma with hearing aids. You have to get over both the internal ego and the external stigma. For many people, that means admitting they're aging and "need help".
Frankly, it really doesn't matter how amazing the hardware is. That's just an incredibly challenging problem to overcome.
The example they cite is people with vision problem. Very few people hide their glasses. If anything, at this point, glasses are often considered as enhancing a person's beauty.
Get somebody to design hearing aids that are meant to be noticed instead of badly hidden.
Or do people just talk more loudly at you since they don’t know how well you can hear.
The stigma is in conversations...
The hearing aids themselves will be physically abused. Worn in saunas, get packed with ear wax, be left in freezing temps, get chewed up by pets, stepped on, dropped into sinks and toilets. It’s actually incredible that most are repairable despite all of that, without even needing to return to the manufacturer.
They also need to be usable by those with limited mobility and no ability to use tech, and relatives with no idea what to do except replace the battery and put them in the ears.
- The power budget of a traditional HA is ~1mW and operate on ~1V. Existing vendors use custom silicon with sub-threshold designs to hit this. I see this as one of their largest moats. Lipo rechargeable wearables work around this problem.
- Customers for your product want their hearing back, and that's not something HAs realistically provide. So selling them is pretty weird as your customer isn't going to be completely satisfied and newer HAs won't improve much along this dimension. On the other hand you can sell "comfort" via noise reduction, bluetooth streaming, and whatever technology buzzwords you can fit on a brochure.
- But can my fancier DSP algorithms improve speech understanding in noise? Maybe, but you've got a 10ms latency budget in which to do so. Hard to compete with the human brain which can cheat and backdate perceptions into the past.
- FM systems, on the other hand, can dramatically improve speech understanding by eliminating noise and echoes. Right now it's only a fit for situations where you can mic the speaker. Traditional HA companies have a hand in making these.
Let's not forget the rigor it must stand up to (water, wax, sweat, heat, temp differentials, dead skin buildup, etc.).
In the early days you need to bring together a group of people with a diverse set of skills --- mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, firmware engineers, audio engineers, regulatory specialists, people with experience working with factories, along with ML engineers in our case. You need a lot more people to bring a product to market than if you're building another SaaS company. (And, of course, all your code is running on a chip that has to be small enough to fit behind their ear.) Then hardware startups also have a problem that they tend to have slower growth and lower margins than successful software startups. So later stage VCs are more inclined to invest in software startups.
Hearing aids are also unique in that they require a lot of tuning to get the audio to sound as natural as possible. There are dozens of algorithms that process different features of the audio, things like wind noise reduction and feedback cancellation, and some of them can be a bit finicky. Companies like Oticon or Widex have hundreds of engineers who have been tuning these algorithms for decades. (Another advantage the big guys have is that they can make custom silicon So if you want a top of the line hearing aid the bar is very high. Then until recently there were big barriers to entry on the sales side --- you weren't selling just to the customer, you were also selling to the audiologist, and many audiologists have incentives to (mostly) sell a single brand. This is less of a barrier now with the recent changes to allow hearing aids to be sold over-the-counter.
I do hope to see another startup give it a go because I still think there's room for disruption --- the big companies move a lot slower than a startup can, and the ODML space is developing very, very quickly. But it's not a project for the faint of heart.