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Hopefully the FDA will not move to block this.

If it's not marketed as a medical device, the FDA can't do anything about it. For the same reasons they don't regulate telescopes and binoculars.

They won’t, there are already unregulated audio amplifiers. But everyone should know that trying to use headphones as hearing aids is exceedingly dangerous. Hearing aids are carefully tuned by doctors to prevent the loud noises they produce from accelerating hearing loss. The Live Listen feature is best used with hearing aids, not AirPods.

This contradicts what I've heard from my wife's best friend who was diagnosed with hearing loss several years ago & has been using hearing aids. According to her, hearing aids themselves are dangerous, expensive & flaky. She complains there is no "one size fits all", and she needs at least two or three different ones. Eg, she has one which is great for indoor conversations, but is very susceptible to wind noise, which she said gets amplified so much it is dangerous. On the other end, she has one she wears outdoors that is great for rejecting wind noise, but she says is useless for indoor conversations with lots of people talking. These are devices which cost thousands.

I'm going to forward this article to her; hopefully she has an old phone she can install the beta on and try this.

I work in an audiology research lab. It is true that hearing aids can degrade your hearing. But if it is tuned by an audiologist it can do significantly more damage. Of course that does little good for people without health insurance - hearing aids are so expensive. But if you can possibly afford to see an audiologist and care about maintaining your hearing (which not everyone does) you should absolutely not use untuned audio amplifiers.

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