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Ask Slashdot: Why Are Hearing Aids So Expensive?
solune writes "You can get a tablet these days for a few hundred dollars, and laptops for a few hundred more. Gaming consoles, TVs, and smartphones are all available for under a thousand bucks. Yet, a decent hearing aid for my mom will go upwards of $3000! With ever-shrinking electronic components, better capabilities, and technological advancements, not to mention the rapidly increasing potential user base, I would think quality hearing aids should be coming in a lot cheaper than what we can find. Adding fuel to my fire is that a hearing aid will greatly improve my mom's life — not to mention the lives of millions of others out there. Currently, she suffers from frustration and isolation with having to ask people to 'speak up', and nodding her head to things her kids and grandkids say. We've tried the cheapies, and they're fraught with problems. So, can someone tell me why a hearing aid should be so expensive?"
'nuff said
About 2 to 4 of every 1,000 people in the United States are "functionally deaf," though more than half became deaf relatively late in life; fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 people in the United States became deaf before 18 years of age.
However, if people with a severe hearing impairment are included with those who are deaf, then the number is 4 to 10 times higher. That is, anywhere from 9 to 22 out of every 1,000 people have a severe hearing impairment or are deaf. Again, at least half of these people reported their hearing loss after 64 years of age.
Finally, if everyone who has any kind of "trouble" with their hearing is included then anywhere from 37 to 140 out of every 1,000 people in the United States have some kind of hearing loss, with a large share being at least 65 years old.
So even at 140, even ignoring those that cannot be helped by hearing aids and those that cannot afford hearing aids, the truth is that far more than 140 out of 1,000 people buy the products you mentioned. If you move a higher volume, you can price them lower and approach their true cost as your design and overhead costs diminish with numbers. What's more is that "a laptop" will more or less work for me the same as it will work for you. We don't need to mold the laptop to put it in our ears or have it tuned to our needs.
You also seem to overlook two factors: as electronics get smaller they get more expensive. The second part is that as electronics need to power themselves and get smaller they get even more expensive. And on top of that, my cell phone puts out a lot of heat. The kind of heat I would not want in my ear. So you have to consider that the battery must be small and must not dissipate tons of heat and so therefore the electronics must have a very low power draw. There's not much of a conspiracy to find here, it's an unfortunate reality that prevents someone from storming the market with the new better cheaper hearing aid (pending tech advancements).
In my family, we look at chipping in to buy our elders hearing aids for presents, I know the nice ones are crazy expensive.
My work here is dung.
http://www.embracehearing.com/
Just add {In Space!} to anything.
MOST insurance policies do NOT cover hearing aides. As a person who's been wearing hearing aides for the last 30+ years, I can guarantee you this. Only if you work for a much larger corporation with a VERY nice benefits package, will you find an insurance policy that will cover your hearing aides - or even a portion of it.
My last pair cost me just shy of $4000. I paid out of pocket since my insurance at the time didn't cover this expense. This is, to date, the second biggest expense I've ever paid, after my car. They were top of the range 11 years ago. I can buy an equivalent model now with the same features from Costco's hearing center now for about $500 each.
Maybe your mum doesn't need the top of the range aides? Try looking for some with fewer features - say only six channels and two or three programs each (one program for normal environment, one for noisy environment, and one for telephone use if she should so desire). You'll save a ton of money.
The other reason why hearing aides are usually so expensive is that not everybody has the same ear shape. All in-the-ear aides are made from a custom mold, which does increase the cost. My dad recently got a behind-the-ear pair that didn't include a custom mold. The tips fit into the canal, similar to a pair of newer earbud headphones. (They still cost him $1200 for the pair though.)
Your mileage may vary. I highly suggest you shop around. Just remember though - you get what you pay for, and always buy the insurance plan on the li'l buggers.
I see them now too, that hook up with bluetooth to ones cell phone to make talking on those easier.
There's quite a bit of high tech audio processing in these things...and with the research and all, and lets face it...proprietary, patented algorithms and the like....it isn't cheap to make a quality hearing aid these days. They're packing a lot more than just amplification in these tiny units.
One important step is...get with a GOOD audiologist that you can work with...for testing and picking out the ones with the features that work best for you or those that need them.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
- hearing aids are Class I regulated medical devices... I can only imagine the amount of bureaucracy that must be involved to obtaining that classification.
That's pretty much the only thing you've said that matters. Well that and the fact that most of them are at least partially customized to the patient. Unlike some products which are significantly cheaper in canada because of collective bargaining and our healthcare system refusing to waste money on billing the way the US does, hearing aids are about the same here.
To sell any medical device it goes through layers of scrutiny. My grandfather in india had a hearing aid where he could hear people fine, but he couldn't hear phones. (I doubted his honesty of hearing fine, but he could at least understand what I was saying from another room with a north american accent speaking english even though he spoke hindi as a first language). But it never worked over the phone. Bizarre. Shit like that wouldn't ever be tolerated by a north american consumer, or by a north american insurance system (government or private).
It also depends very much on what problem you have. Some of the cheap hearing aids do work fine if you have one type of hearing loss but not another. If you need a bone conduction hearing aid (Baha branded) you're looking at 3grand, if you need a cochlear speech processor you're taking 5k or more. The term 'hearing aid' covers fairly simplistic devices to very sophisticated ones. If you have a rare or complicated problem expect rare, expensive solutions.
Just like college tuition. The easier it is to fund an education the more expensive it gets.
Definitely there's more paperwork involved with a Class 1 medical device than say a DVD player, but if both manufacturers follow good management and development practices, it's not really that much more paperwork.
If a persons hearing in each ear is charted, frequency versus sensitivity you fine a lot of variation in people with hearing loss at various frequencies caused by various legal and not legal drugs, loud music, impulse noise from Guns of jets etc. The hearing aid is then programmed to boost/cut various frequencies to get as close as possible to the natural ear with no deficiencies. They have built in equalization. The better the resolution of this equalization and the better the job the audiologists do and the better hearing aid purchased = best results. The hearing aid itself has a base cost of about $50, plus fees to program each one, test with the person in a quiet room, fit to the ear drum shape etc, all adds cost. Low power, more efficient units cost more = last longer on smaller battery
That said, there are many ripoffs out there, and many locked up distribution channels by people who want to sell a $50 item for $2000. Hearing loss forums can help, but they get a lot of manufacturers shills in there, takes a while to know the crooks.
Do you realise how much it "costs" to configure a digital filter? The answer is, next to nothing.
Programs like MATLAB can calculate the necessary coefficients on the fly. Any skilled engineer can write a program to convert a given frequency and phase characteristics to a list of filter coefficients. Even if you want to do fancy things like lattice filters it's still not very complicated as most of these are designed by converting the direct form of the filter using a recursive algorithm. Again something a computer can do.
The actual cost I'd say comes from the size of the hardware combined with a good battery. If you wish to miniaturize it'll cost you big time. And quantities in the hundreds of thousands aren't quite enough to warrant the cost of miniaturization as these sort of things will take some custom hardware. Mask fabrication and set-up costs for a run of wafers; well it isn't cheap.
Familiar with duplexer tuning, however a hearing aid is mono-directional, and as solidraven (1633185) says, determining the gain versus frequency profile should be quick. Frequencies that have gone fully deaf - no cochlear hairs left, will probably not be compensatable with an external device, we can directly stimulate the nerves with a cochlear implant, after which the person learns to hear anew. Here is a simple youtube about it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmNpP2fr57A, the comments are also of interest. This search is also useful http://tinyurl.com/cq8bz3w.
It is my understanding that you can buy the programmable chip that is a complete processor heart of a hearing aid from many makers. Here is another search on that topic.
http://tinyurl.com/cwcuwuq.
Even more "Bogus" in that you can get the SAME Siemens #2000.00 hearing aid (US) in Singapore for $180.00 (US).
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd