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Google Is Developing Native Hearing Aid Support For Android (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google announced today that it's working with Danish hearing aid manufacturer GN Hearing to create a new hearing aid spec for Android smartphones called ASHA, or Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids. It's designed to be battery-efficient, while providing high quality audio with low latency. Hearing aids utilizing this spec will be able to connect to and stream from Android devices without having to use another intermediate device. ASHA will enable Bluetooth hearing aids to be utilized the same way as headphones, used to call friends or listen to music. Google has published the new protocol specifications online for any hearing aid manufacturer to build native hearing aid support for Android. GN Hearing has announced that the ReSound LiNX Quattro and Beltone Amaze will be the first hearing aids to receive direct streaming support in a future update.
Ok, 40 years ago, this was high tech stuff. But today you are spending thousands of dollars (or your insurance company is, or the government) for a form fitted earbud of questionable quality.
The formfitting, should be the most expensive part, which should be the same as what professional or active armature swimmers get for their earplugs. Then you in essence stuff $30 worth of technology in them.
Hearing Aids should probably cost today around $100.00 and still make profit.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Now I don't know much about hearing aids -- but then this is /. I can have a strong opinion anyway -- but why aren't hearing aids already standard bluetooth audio devices? I imagine it's not *quite* that simple, but it seems bizarre to me that this is even needed, we've had a protocol for transmitting sound data between devices for ages. It's pretty disappointing that this is even necessary. Can someone with more experience expand on this?
This is great in that it will give hearing aids direct streaming access like apple has had for years. This was supposed to show up in the next few years in a BLE spec (isochronous channels) but this will get things rolling even faster.
A big win for android hearing aid users.
All the better to hear you with.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
It's called telecoil.
This is has been mandatory by law in the USA since 1988 for wired phones, and since 2003 for wireless phones.
https://www.healthyhearing.com...
Google Is Developing Native Hearing Aid Support For Android
Trumpist isolationist policy - why can't the non-natives have it too?
How about a hearing app that doesnt require an $8000 rip off hearing aid?
Because even the hard of hearing need to hear those ads.
I have two kids who need hearing aids and this is not the first time I've seen these types of claims for wireless/device connections. They both have Bluetooth equipped devices and they're pretty marginal in terms of their usability. The two hearing aids listed here are $3k+ and, depending on your insurance, you will probably have to pay a pretty high percentage of that.
On the point of cost, most of what is paid out goes to the audiologist who's fitting and programming the hearing aids. $3k for a set of hearing aids is a lot of money when the audiologist doesn't know what they're doing and will result in you basically throwing the money away. But, an audiologist that knows what they are doing can make the $3k a bargain in the difference the person has in terms of improved hearing. Note that an audiologist who is skilled at working with the elderly will probably not have the experience dealing with hearing loss in younger people.
As for connecting to the phone, both of my kids have found that Bose Quiet Comfort 3 headphones work a lot better than their Bluetooth equipped hearing aids when taking calls, watching TV and playing games. From a person on the other side of the conversation, their ability to understand what is being said and respond appropriately is much better than with their existing hearing aids (Oticon - which work very well for them in normal conversation/circumstances) connected to their phones.
If you (or somebody in the family) needs hearing aids and wants to connect to phones and other devices, I'd recommend NOT going out and buying these hearing aids until the reviews are in and you have a quality audiologist who has experience with them.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
High end hearing aids (as WhatHump) indicated are very sophisticated devices and should probably cost around $100 to make (going by my experience with cellphones/manufacturing).
But, the big cost is the audiologist programming the DSPs in the hearing aids to the user. Ear moulds don't take very long to do and should not be more than $50 or so per ear.
A good audiologist with the right equipment (including a testing booth) that is willing to take the time to a) characterize the person's hearing loss, b) program the devices and design the ear mould to the user (there's actually a number of features that they can design into the mould to make the result better) and c) test/demonstrate the improvement in a testing booth and then tweak the programming and maybe redo the ear moulds to improve how the user can hear. Note that they need to test in different situations including moderately high noise to ensure there isn't feedback/buzzing by the hearing aid.
If you're spending less than two hours with the audiologist and they're not doing quantifiable tests to demonstrate that the hearing aid is working, you're probably getting ripped off. For my son, it took four hours and three ear moulds to get his right and the improvement was remarkable.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Telecoil uses magnetic coupling (similar to wireless charging, only lower power) rather than RF. The range is minuscule (inches at best). The new standard would be similar to Bluetooth so you wouldn't have to stick your phone up to your ear like with Telecoil.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I've never heard of this.
Authorities believe the hacking group Snarfblat is to blame for the recent rash of bizarre robberies perpetrated by senior citizens claiming they heard the clerk say "You are the 100th customer today, your purchase is free". This may be related to a similar occurrence last week in which 100 Seniors were redirected to a Sunglass Hut after being told thier flight was moved to a different terminal.
Good to see this coming to Android. I didn't even consider there were any challenges of using mobile phones with hearing aids.
I did have a quick search about that other brand, so see how it compares: https://support.apple.com/en-c... . The HAC rating is explain in article at the Better Hearing Institute.
One thing I am curious about, is beyond the software work going into Android, how much Google will need to push the hardware manufactures to get that functionality integrated into the phones, if extra engineering is needed?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Will this include DRM to monitor and/or censor any unlicensed, unregulated and anti-Alphabet/US government material?
Will the hearing aids and handheld robots that implement this protocol have the source code available, in a reproducibly building way so that we can verify what they do is what they say they do?
Did the Verge ask these questions? If not, why not?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Google is actively trying to stop the disabled from using the web with Recaptcha (I'm guessing low income therefore need to be filtered out of advertising/data collection). So this is probably an excuse to inject a vulnerability for some nefarious purpose, or trying to dodge more taxes by claiming phones are medical devices.
...wait till they stop playing that vacuum cleaner ad.
My Signia hearing aids cost about $5000 and that is certainly outrageous.
There's also the matter of economy of scale. A hearing aid chip is an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) and a complex, multicore, one at that.
I've been on several such projects. As of a few years ago the non-recurring expenses of building one paid to the fab was over a million bux, and the engineering team was much more.
And if you made ANY mistakes that required a "spin" it was anywhere from about half that (if you could fix it by adjusting some metal layers to change the hookup and maybe wire up extra gates you'd left lying around in the sea of "glue logic" just for that purpose) to the full price all over again. So you spent a LOT of engineering and server-farm time with costly licensed software to simulate the HELL out of it.
Now that engineering cost gets spread across the sales of all the chips you sell. If it's a consumer chip that goes into something nearly everybody with the money to do it buys, and you end up with a two-digit percentage of the world market, you might spread it so thin that the chip sells for less than a buck over the cost of manufacturing (and that gets driven down because there's so MANY built that the manufacturing batches are large and the setup cost also gets diluted.)
But if you have to spread it over a few thousand or tens-of-thousands of customers, you could easily have one or more thousands of bucks PER CHIP of engineering costs that the customer has to cover to keep your operation afloat.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Apparently they work well on Apple already.
Android needs a new standard instead of using whatever is making them work on iPhones currently BECAUSE _________.
I just can not seem to find the last piece of that explaination :O ...Perhaps Google couldn't see what was sent to your earpiece then...