Using AirPods as a hearing aid | Hacker News Reader

Using AirPods as a hearing aid

daringfireball.net

27 pointschmaynard14 comments

A family member is always complaining that her hearing aids are crap, noisy, harsh and yet, not allowing her to actually hear very well.. Shes had them readjusted multiple times with no improvement.

I tried putting some Beyer-dynamics 990 Pro 80 Ohm on her, and then plugging that into the line-out of a hand-held zoom recorder with the sensitivity turned up. She heard _EVERYTHING_ and she told that the sound was pleasant too..

This leaves me with the impression that hearing aids are way behind off-the-shelf consumer parts.. Maybe too much sound quality (you had ONE job!) is being sacrificed for size ?

Yes.

Size (= compute+battery limitation) and the ear also being a somewhat hostile environment for electronics.

PS: Is that zoom recorder able to "beamform" (~= directional mics / mic modes inside?)

It's a two-track recorder, the "h1", so it has two microphones in there, with pretty good stereo imaging, I don't know about the directionality, it seems to pick up all around, but probably more in the human voice range.

It really got me thinking, in a lot of situations, what would people prefer ? If the aids just looked like normal large cups, then you're just looking like a music freak.. I'd go for that any day, rather than having uncomfortable in-ears which aren't even working as well.

There ought to be a product like that.. build some directional mics discreetly into some large cups along with amp circuit and batteries..

I suspect battery life is a big one. Airpods are what, 3-5 hours? Hearing aids can last a few days.

Sounds like she had either very low end hearing aids or they were poorly tuned.

High end hearing aids don't just do band tuned amplification, they also filter out repeating noises like a fridge hum, and the left & right share microphone data with very low latency to isolate voices in noisy environments.

Gruber is reblogging someone else's post, which itself was guilty of the same thing.

Credit where credit is due:

https://toot.cat/@garry/110005074038777944

Thank you!

Apple AirPods Pro 2 Detailed Hearing Aid Review:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x0gsTz1sSDE

Cheers, this is vastly more interesting and informative than Gruber's post.

I'm on my 3rd hearing aid and unfortunately they haven't gotten much better for me in the past ten years, dispute the claims the technology has gotten so much better. I think it's because the signal processing challenges for single sided hearing loss is totally different for bilateral hearing loss. It's also a much smaller and there for under prioritized market segment.

I'd be interested in a hearing aid project based on pinebuds pro https://pine64.com/product/pinebuds-pro-open-firmware-capabl...

As a deaf person, I don't use Airpods. But I'm aware of hearing aids and their pricing. AirPods are far far cheaper than hearing aids for slight hearing loss and I'm hoping that Apple will do something in this area to improve actual hearing aids.

Many hearing aids for profoundly deaf people (like myself at the 80-100dB mark in hearing loss) are just insufficient.

Let's get in touch.

For?

My mom tried the same thing with not much luck. It just amplified background noise too much according to her to be useful.

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