The social impact of a better and more affordable hearing aid would be immense. Especially since the social isolation of hearing loss takes such a devastating toll on one’s social life. And it’s there’s interesting technical challenges that have to be solved. Mainly packing as much digital signal processing onto a very low compute environment.
As someone with hearing loss, it’s sad to see promising startups like Whisper.AI leave the market. There should be dozens of hearing aid startups out there. Where are they?
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
On a semi related note, my sister had early onset hearing loss, and needs hearing aids. One thing that surprised me about what they are doing with them now is they are Bluetooth enabled, so she can listen to music on them from her phone. It can be a bit annoying though because there’s no social queue that says I have headphones on and can’t hear you if you are trying to start a conversation.
I use them all the time, for phone calls and for podcasts, and it drives my wife crazy.
It’s actually no different from someone having airpods in, just less visible.