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?
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
I don’t know about in the us, but here in Canada I can get hearing aids at Costco for about $1,000 each. And the provincial government kicks in $500, so I could get a pair for $1,000.
Still a significant amount of money, but within my budget.
Costco’s hearing centers also employ licensed audiologists (minimum of a master’s degree), rather than “hearing aid specialists” who have just done a two-year college course.