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figlu t1_iyxbwlv wrote

There's a research paper that showed AirPods mostly can replace expensive hearing aid devices. This is a long time coming.

https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(22)01708-4.pdf

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nekogatonyan t1_iyyfeaa wrote

This is not what the research shows. It shows that the AirPod Pros work similarly to premium hearing aids when the noise is coming from the lateral side, but not the front side. There were not significant differences in quiet environments, but there were in noisy environments. People who are hard of hearing need the most assistance in noisy environments.

Second of all, they looked at people who had bilateral sensorineural hearing loss in the mild-to-moderate range. If I know anything about the audiology world, it's that nothing ever happens that way in real life and tons of people have different hearing levels in their ears. They didn't even tell us where the hearing loss occurred. Was it in the high pitches or the low pitches? Did all the patients experience hearing loss in the same frequencies?

What I don't understand about this study is how they got the AirPods to pick up noise in the room that did not come from the phone. I understand how they did it with hearing aids because hearing aids have microphones that pick up stuff from the environment, which then gets amplified and converted into sound in someone's ear.

How did they program the Airpods to do that? Because I thought the point of earphones was to block out the sound around you and pump in the sound from the phone. When you speak into a microphone on the airpods, it goes to someone else's hearing set. So how did they reroute it to the Airpods own hearing set? It was not explained in the methods. EDIT: It's apparently a built in feature with the iphone and Airpods Pro called "Headphone Accommodations."

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AsteroidFilter t1_iyym2k3 wrote

60% deaf in both ears here. Out of 10, I'm usually at a 3. With headphones/earbuds watching movies, I"m maybe at a 6. With hearing aids, 7-8 maybe?

As an adult, I'm faced with two choices: fork up $6k somehow for hearing aids or spend $140 on amazon for hearing amplifiers and wear them when I need to.

I know there are heavy regulations for hearing aids over sound amplifiers but I don't see how they justify a 4200% price increase?

I feel like I should just make eyeglasses with a microphone connected to a local speech transcriber like Whisper or Nemo and just display subtitles as some kind of overlay on the glass. Eliminate the need for the deaf to translate speech into words entirely. For all languages.

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MelMac5 t1_iz0ixf8 wrote

It was the same with prescription glasses although not to that degree. You could only get the glasses from the optometrist and the Luxottica monopoly. The price drastically decreased once the free market got a hold of it. I'm wearing $20 Zennis now.

I'm even fine with requiring a prescription for hearing devices, since as others have posted it helps rule out other issues such as infection, impacted wax, etc. Also helps pinpoint the best device.

But the outrageous markup on these things is something I'm glad to see being addressed by opening up the market.

Do CPAP machines next!

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figlu t1_iyylro8 wrote

Yes there are limitations of this study. You can read all of them in the limitations section.

AirPods two have mics in them for hands free calling. These mics can also be used to amplify environmental sound. I think there's a setting you can turn on to use them as hearing aids.

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