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Apple Plans Hearing Aid Social Networking
theodp writes "Apple may have killed off Ping, its attempt at a music social network, but the USPTO on Thursday disclosed that Apple has patent-pending plans for a hearing aid-based social network. So, if Apple's granted patents covering its Social Network for Sharing a Hearing Aid Setting and method of Remotely Updating a Hearing Aid Profile, will it use them to 'go thermonuclear' on Google when the search giant gets around to improving its current offerings for the hard of hearing?"
I couldn't hear you.
nt
Why would people share hearing aid settings with others? Isn't this the type of device set by the operator's preferences?
Having a short range communication between hearing aids and external devices has advantages in calibration, but I just don't get the social part.
This used to be more of an "if" question, now it's definitely more of a "when."
I knew they had a for after their earbuds made everyone prematurely deaf.
Dear Apple, I paid a bucket of money for my hearing aids - in excess of NZ$7000 - please leave the damn things alone. If I need to tune them with wizzy settings, I will let the professionals who know what they're doing do it. PS. If I want to join a social network for sharing hearing aid settings - I'll join the 'Patents Killed by Prior Art network' on facebook.
"John has changed his hearing aid microphone setting from omni-directional to directional."
I'm sure Apple could come up with an easy interface on the iPhone to quickly adjust, rate and share settings. Maybe even store some info about each person's hearing loss profile to better match people with settings...
Of course, I haven't read the article yet, so this could be redundant.
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
You are smearing WHAT on apple cans?
After Apple corners the hearing aid social networking market, they'll network insulin pumps before moving on to the Holy Grail of medical device social networking...pace makers. In a related story, hackers are clamoring for developer SDKs to be first in line to wreck havoc in this new threat vector.
Would a post about Apple have a Google logo on.
"The computer giant today admitted to having a fleet of planes and helicopters which have been flying over major cities around the world." And so commences the Apple Invasion.
the problem is accumulated delay. That is the time between presentation of the signal to its final output into the hearing aids' speakers. If only Bluetooth is involved then the delay is bearable, but if it requires another type of signal conversion, ala the Rexton or Bernafon type remote control / convertor then the delay becomes very noticeable and unacceptable. I have the Rexton aids and I can't use them as on stage monitors because of the delay. The real problem is the power consumption of a BT receiver /transmitter in the haring aids- it eats power quick and results in a quick fail when the power drops too low.
My guess is that Apple may have a way to put a power efficient BT device in a hearing aid - I really hope so. I have had a loss for years, have been programming my own aids through four models, and, by and large, most audiologists are way undertrained, especially when it comes to real world, as in live music, fidelity in hearing aids.. And hearing aid companies with the exception of Bernafon, ignore the needs of hard of hearing music lovers and musicians. And I speak from bitter experience.
I have worked hard to get my aids to pre from at their best,and no thanks to the supposed hearing aid professionals who called me "too demanding, "too specialized" expects too much" and totally ignored my work. My work has been published in Hearing Review, and I still get treated like a problem child.
Troll much?
Given the mixed results of Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids, this seems like talking about sending a man to mars. Given that warning, it would be nice if hearing aids worked together to deliver the best audio from the best vantage. The most obvious example would be two hearing-impaired people speaking at a party, Each could use the other's mic to pick-up their partner's voice, then cancel everything else out with their own device's mic. Obviously, this requires some kind of standard, which will never happen in the medical device business. Heaven forbid that such equipment becomes commoditized.
In the U.S., the many hearing aid brands are manufactured by a tiny number of original equipment manufacturers (OEM) who control patents and technology. The remaining OEM's have bought up smaller competitors and their patent rights. For the most part, hearing aids are sold through branded stores or via distribution to audiologists and hearing specialists. The retail markups are ridiculously high, so that many pay $2,000 - $5,000 or more for a device far simpler in design than most any comparable consumer electronic device. To add even simple improvements (Bluetooth, coatings for moisture resistance, multiple profiles for sound equalization, more sophisticated feedback protection, rechargeable batteries) adds hundreds or thousands to the retail price.
If Apple or other major electronics suppliers can simplify and improve hearing aid technology, then bravo. My state-of-the-art aids are often flummoxed in large public spaces with complicated acoustics. If a crowd-sourced sound pattern would allow me to hear better, you bet I'd take advantage of it. But the real benefit for the long-term might be in standardization of hearing aid interfaces and protocols so that over time prices might come down. The overwhelming majority of hearing impaired people world wide have no access to aids. Apple and others may be able to bring better hearing technology to the masses.
Apple products are not cool. Apple as a company is not cool. The brand, the logo, the marketing campaign: all no longer cool.
That's all I've been hearing lately. People talking about how it's so uncool to own Apple products now, how it makes you look like a douche because of Apple's shitty corporate behavior.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Apple's design concepts revolve around a simple experience for the 80%, and accessibility support for the 20% has historically been a long time in coming. It took 3 years for captioning to arrive on their Apple TV platform, and the iPhone didn't get accessibility features until its third iteration. I can and have recommended Apple products to others, but for this reason I am unable to use them myself.
I cannot think of a worse company to have a lock up on accessibility-related patents :(
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/EarPod
You need to be more subtle when trying to poison the well. If you want to propagate this anti-Apple meme you just invented, you need to insinuate it "in passing" as a tangent within a conversation that otherwise adheres to current social convention.
Don't try to get a supertanker to take a 90 degree turn. Instead, be patient and try to misalign the rudder calibration: cf. "Wow, that Retina display on the new MacBook could really be a game-changer in the market. My friends and I just wish that Apple engineers hadn't chosen to power the display backlights by using a module that torments the bottled souls of three orphans. There *has* to be another way to get decent battery life..."
Unless you were intending to target 6th graders with your campaign. In that case, carry on with the bludgeon tactics.
Back in my Tandy days it was always fun to help somebody with hearing aid batteries.
the "correct" way to change the batteries
1 have the person hand you an old pack (you need this for the color/size)
2 grab the pack of batteries and pop 1 out
3 have them take the hearing aid out and pop open the battery compartment
4 check to make sure you have the correct battery
5 remove the tab from the battery and spend 30 seconds marveling at the engineering that went into the battery*
6 install the new battery (it should only fit one way)
7 close the compartment and hand the hearing aid back (give it a swipe with a cleaning towel if you want to go that far)
8 ring up the battery
Then you have a happy customer
* actually this is to make sure the Zinc Air cell lights up completely
trying to sell batteries to somebody that can't hear worth [redacted] is not fun.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Who are you calling disabled, bigot?!
Is it me of is Apple quickly becoming the local bully? Screw them.
Heh.
just no.
This is the worst slashdot title/article/posting yet.
I keep posting that, or meaning to post that and losing interest... let's see if this one makes it thorough.
Like anyone can even know that
Apple and Google should stop copying Microsoft. Come up with your own sh.... sorry, couldn't keep a straight face.
Apple seems to be touting that this remotely updaing your hearing aid profile is a brand new concept. It isn't. I say this because I've been researching hearing aids for my father and recently came across a compnay by the name of Audiotoniq. They claim they will be using blue tooth technology so that the hearing aid wearer can customize hearing aid profiles. This to me sounds almost exactly like what Apple is attempting to do. I don't know, but it def seems the hearing aid market is about to change completely. Which it should, bc these things are way way too expensive.
I got wind of this article from my teammates. I'm the lead engineer at a tiny startup in Austin, TX called Audiotoniq. We built a bluetooth controlled hearing aid with an Android interface years ago. The iPhone app has always been second on our list due to technical hurdles and limited resources. We've shrunk the design for this final production rev, which is why we didn't release our (larger) functional betas to the public last fall. I think I can add some helpful information on this topic for anyone interested.
If you google for Audiotoniq patents, you'll find our patent disclosures that have published to get an idea of what we felt was worth protecting to keep the big guys from crushing us. We publish what's called a provisional patent so our initial filings stay hidden for about a year (there are many apps you can't see). This is what the little startups that don't have much money do as opposed to the big guys that go right to utility apps.
We poked around the web a bit and found a Danish article that claims GN ReSound is the company that has partnered with Apple (http://www.business.dk/digital/danskere-skal-lave-hoereapparater-til-apple). We noted a long time ago that the ReSound Alera had a 2.4GHz radio yet did not use bluetooth. This was quite puzzling at the time. When manufacturers go wireless, they either use the telecoil + streamer or a very low frequency/low power wireless protocol. At the time, bluetooth low energy was still in preliminary spec form, and now given the Apple WWDC announcement + this Danish article, it makes a lot more sense as to why the Alera has a 2.4GHz radio in it.
As far as social sharing of profiles, we talked about this years ago. Here's some background on hearing aids and how social settings could be applied:
Hearing loss is different from person to person. What happens in your audiologist office is that an audiogram (measure of hearing threshold levels) is taken and plugged into a computer. This computer runs what is called a fitting algorithm. Modern ones generate 3 gain target levels per frequency. These gain levels basically tell the device how loud to make soft sounds, how loud to make normal conversation speech sounds, and also how loud to make loud sounds. The goal is generally to make soft sounds audible, normal conversation comfortable, and loud sounds louder than normal conversation levels but not to an uncomfortable level. The techie term is wide dynamic range compression (WDRC). These modern prescriptive formulas usually fall into 2 main buckets: NAL-NL1/NAL-NL2 (National Acoustics Laboratory, Non-Linear Version 1/2) and the Desired Sensation Level (DSL) with various versions. There are others (CAM2, FIG6, IHAFF, LGOB, etc.) but those are the 2 most well-known currently. Most manufacturers license these algorithms, some modify them slightly, then include this in their audiologist software. This provides the starting point for fitting. After that, there is sound shaping of those curves using an equalizer. From a social perspective, it would be possible to share some parameters that are not necessarily associated with WDRC. For example, noise reduction, the sound shaping of equalizers on top of the WDRC settings (perhaps cutting lows and highs if significant environmental noise is contained in those frequencies), whether or not directionality is applied, and so on.
Of course, we have a better plan, but I have to keep some things secret ;-).
My best guess is that the folks that have partnered with Apple will be using BLE (hence iPhone 4s and beyond). Most hearing aids today use zinc air batteries. These have a good energy density for their size as one of the chemicals involved in the reaction to make energy is air, thus they have tiny air holes in them. The size of these air holes limits the rate of the chemical reaction, and hence limits the current that can be produced. Typically bluetooth often has high peak currents (the average current is quite acceptable) when the radio turns on to lis