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Why Can't Industry Design an Affordable Hearing Aid?
Hugh Pickens writes "Tricia Romano writes in the NY Times that over the last 10 years, purchasing a hearing aid had become even more difficult and confusing than buying a new car — and almost as expensive. 'I visited Hearx, the national chain where I had bought my previous aids. There, a fastidious young man spread out a brochure for my preferred brand, Siemens, and showed me three models. The cheapest, a Siemens Motion 300, started at $1,600. The top-of-the-line model was more than $2,000 — for one ear. I gasped.' A hearing aid is basically just a microphone and amplifier in your ear so it isn't clear why it costs thousands of dollars while other electronic equipment like cellphones, computers and televisions have gotten cheaper. Russ Apfel, an engineer who designed a technology now found in all hearing aids, says there is no good reason for the high prices. 'The hearing aid industry uses every new thing, like digital or a new algorithm, to raise prices,' says Apfel. 'The semiconductor industry traditionally reduces the cost of products by 10 to 15 percent a year,' he said, but 'hearing aids go up 8 percent a year annually' and have for the last 20 years."
very true. I wonder what the companies profit margins are.
Why hasn't anyone kickstartered a competitor?
The ______ Agenda
Sorry, but you've been misinformed. If you have any medical procedure done, you can call them and ask for a discount because you are uninsured and paying out-of-pocket. Although they are not obligated to do so, they usually will, and you will often only have to pay 25%ish of the original costs.
If you think my surgeon would have made me come up with $16k (the amount they billed my insurance for) cash for my 1-hour procedure if I had no insurance, then you have a strong misunderstanding of how the healthcare industry works. I'd like to think I know at least a little bit about it. After all, I'm employed at a hospital.
My significant other is a speech pathologist and she went to school with a bunch of audiologists. While they were in school the audiology students were able to attend several lavish conferences, fully paid for (travel and hotel). Who paid for them? The hearing aid companies. They were given tickets to hockey games (yes this is Canada) and even jewelry. She asked her audiologist classmates if they felt it was a conflict of interest that they were accepting these gifts from the hearing aid companies. Most shrugged it off and said it wouldn't affect their opinions of the products. But how could it not? A few products then get recommended to patients, the companies can jack up the prices, and of course the audiologist will sell you the most expensive one because that is the one the companies are pushing as the best in the market. Review your hearing aid options online and take the audiologists word on a product with a grain of salt.
Canada.
Check on hearing aid costs in Canada. You will discover they are very high there as well.
A couple other points:
We deafies want to change our batteries every week or more, not every day. Have you seen the tiny size of current batteries? You must squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of the hardware possible.
The receivers (aka speakers that go in the ear) must be versatile enough to produce extremely loud sounds across the range of at least 500Hz --> 4KHz with no perceptible distortion. Distortion is the #1 enemy of deafies, and means the difference between "how are you today sir?" and "ajksdhv sdjkch asdkjhvkkf sjk?"
Oh, did I mention the receivers that must be as awesome as above, must also be able to survive something like 18,000 hours in a moist environment? (4 years, 12 hours a day)
The OS and DSP cannot even introduce milliseconds of delay while deciding what is "noise" to be filtered, what is "too loud" and should be compressed, and what was really soft but important enough to amplify even more than normal.
I don't like paying thousands of dollars for my aids, but neither do I believe they can sell for $400.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.