Hearing aid advertising is barely legal

Yes. This has been a bug bear of mine for many years. Lurid claims of comprehension in difficult environments, happy smiling people, being able to transition between different environments seamlessly, the ridiculous promotion of rechargeable hearing aids as a benefit never seen before, opaque comparisons of performance with a “competitor”, a hyperbolic increase in understanding compared to the previous generation. Yadda yadda yadda.

That said, I actually think the advertising in the last 5 to 10 years has toned down a bit. I think somebody threatened a law suit somewhere along the line and the website promotional material, particularly online, have made less claims. Sure, there were some recently, like the 150% improvement of the Resound Nexia and Phonak’s embarrassing claim of a waterproof aid, but on the whole I think there have been less. I may be wrong. I may just have become immune to it all.

What particularly annoys me is that they don’t identify cohorts. So they say, this aid achieves 30% more speech cues, or 15% more comprehension, but they don’t specify whether this is achieved in the mild-moderate, moderate-severe, severe-profound categories. If these figures are only applicable in the mild to moderate, for example, then it is misinformation and gives false hope.

Of course, there have been incremental improvements and some of these have been very good. Bluetooth, the reliability of aids in general, the discreetness due to power available in a smaller size. This is undeniable. But like you say, the issues with respect to speech in noise are still not quite solved, either because the chipsets are not powerful enough (I have read that they are custom chipsets and hence are not as powerful as general chipsets), or that there is still a way to go with the algorithms themselves.

Bidirectional low latency LE Audio could be a game changer. Is anyone working on using the very powerful chip in your phone to do some serious work and use hearing aids simply as microphone and speaker?

This outfit in Cambridge were working on integrating their ALD with Auracast but I think they went bust recently, unfortunately:

AudioTelligence launches Orsana, the first universal assistive listening...4

Orsana is the first universal assistive listening device designed to help everyone hear clearly in noise - with or without hearing aids. In the past, solutions for hearing in noise have either been traditional hearing aids, which need additional own...

I think one of their staff came on here and said at the time that the implementations of bluetooth were too slow and no providers at that time had LE Audio. They implemented a solution using Telecoil instead and used crowdfunding, but as I say, they went bust. I’ve seen another outfit somewhere planning to use LE Audio in some way. Hopefully we will see these solutions coming on to the market soon.

This company is interesting and makes some massive claims

AI Speech Enhancement for Hearing Aids - FEMTOSENSE2

Femtosense enables speech enhancement for hearing aids with the SPU and proprietary algorithm.

The latency in LE Audio might still not be fast enough for realtime decoding.

@OldMusicGuy said:

Well it wasn’t really a lottery, it was a result of many hours of research. I reviewed the background of every audiologist within one hour drive of where I live, phoned several to ask them some searching questions and only one of them met my criteria, the audi I now work with

I hope you @OldMusicGuy will start a new thread (if you haven’t already) on how you selected an audiologist. I know I would be interested.

@raylock1 said:

I hope you @OldMusicGuy will start a new thread (if you haven’t already) on how you selected an audiologist. I know I would be interested.

I posted about my approach on another thread here: OMGs approach to finding a decent audiologist

Missed that. Thanks for the reference.

I didn’t exactly agree w/your OP. But I do agree w/this one. I’ve been wearing HA for over a dozen years. For most of this time I agree w/your OP - advertising claims, and little more. But in the last couple of generations I’ve actually noticed helpful improvements. And I agree that we may be on the cusp of a lot more. But in the end, caveat emptor is still where we need to be.

It’s hard to generalise as it all depends on what level of hearing loss you have. Background noise and rooms with even slight echo are killers for me and my Phonak Marvel equivalents (KS10’s) don’t help much. It’s the hearing in noise claims that bother me.

Right. I have the KS10s, now as backup, and I agree 100%. But they were marginally better than what I had before. Now I have the Philips 9040 and they are a real step up for speech in noise, but still leave a lot to be desired in really noisy environments. So there is opportunity for meaningful improvement. And I think that it will come, with improvements in chip density/performance, and software.

I think of golf equipment (avid, accomplished golfer here). As I got older there were impressive technology improvements in golf equipment that compensated for my age. Now diminishing returns have set in, in the equipment world, and for the first time age is beginning to supercede what equipment can do for me.

On the other extreme we have EVs. Although I spent my working life doing computers I am a mechanical engineer by training and have watched car technology for 60 years with more than casual interest, and clearly ICE technology is mature, whereas EV technology is relatively speaking an infant on the technology road map, evolving hugely fast with enormous potential over the next 10 years or so.

So, where do HAs stand, w/respect to golf equipment and EV technology? I think of HAs today as being somewhere in between, not sure where because I don’t follow the technology like I do golf and cars. My sense of it is, that we are at an inflection point/cusp of real improvement, enough improvement so that it will be like golf equipment in the last 20-25 years - as my natural ability to hear declines technology will keep me in the game for a while, so long as I am willing to ride the technology curve with $$. I sure hope so.

When I’m unable to hear, or perhaps unable to hear in a noisy environment, I wonder whether the features in my “smart” hearing aids really help. It feels as if they hinder my ability to hear.

As my hearing gets worse this issue becomes worse and worse.