Someone will have to explain the difference between these and your average hearing aids, which perform a very similar function, but tuned by an audiologist to your needs.
Disclaimer: I am not an audiologist, but I am married to one :-).
Because of the way your ears function, the vast majority of people who have hearing impairments have them at specific frequency ranges. Hearing aids do amplify sound somewhat, but they mostly work by pitch shifting voices away from your personal weak spots to wherever your hearing is still strongest. They also do some signal processing to differentiate voice-like noises from other sounds, amplify the voice, and actually mute the non-voice sounds.
For people who have some hearing loss, blanket amplification can be counterproductive and dangerous. Turning up the volume across the board doesn't help at all with differentiating signal from background noise, and can cause what hearing you do have left to degrade much faster than it otherwise might due to the increased stress placed on the ear.
Hearing aids are expensive, because they are a medical device. And they are also only available to people with a hearing deficiency. By not being "hearing aids", these are available to a wider audience.
Syringes are a medical device: they're cheap and available to anyone.
Where are you and why aren't hearing aids available to buy for anyone who wants them? Is that a legislation thing, do hearing aids damage not-as-hearing-impaired people's hearing?
Because syringes are inexpensive, you're making the mistake of thinking there isn't a huge markup due to it being a medical device. I'm pretty sure if you were to buy a syringe for injecting plants or something non-human, they would cost a fraction of what they currently cost.
In these very comments someone talks about their hearing aids costing US$6000, being similar in function to the product being discussed.
This is really like having cheap, off-the shelf reading glasses even though prescription reading glasses are available and attuned to your eyes.
And folks would be interested for similar reasons. Insurance might not cover the testing that often or the device itself, for instance, or someone might not think they have the time to go to that doctor. Maybe it is only a problem every once in a while, and so on.
And like cheap reading glasses, it might not be a perfect solution, but a solution nonetheless.
If the app could filter out distant sounds, or be used to filter directionally -- and do it in a non-crappy way -- then this would be genuinely useful.
Based on the photo on the website, they look very different. Instead of being in/around the ear, they appear to have a piece that sits on the back of the neck. This could be for the battery or for an array of mics that are used for noise canceling and focusing.
Maybe a better analogy is ... if hearing aids are glasses, these are reading glasses.
i.e. off-the-shelf, self-diagnosed, cheap and easy solution for part-time use without getting "medical"
(I say "cheap" because I don't know what the Hearphones will cost but I've helped relatives shop for hearing aids and WOW ... from what I gather, as you step up in price in a company's line of hearing aids, ticking off more boxes in their feature matrix, they're probably just enabled bits of code in an otherwise identical DSP ... and the price increments go like this: $3K-$4K-$5K),
>improve hearing even for those that don't have hearing problems //
That's pretty self-contradictory.
Is it perhaps about people simply not wanting to admit they have hearing difficulties, these make it a "non-medical" issue and so allow people to address their poor hearing by-passing any potential stigma [they apply to themselves].
My mother needed hearing aids for a long time, but wouldn't get them, seemingly "because they're for old people".
Some do, although this may be limited to high-end models?
I have a friend who uses hearing aids. They can tune out background noise, focus on directions, turn off hearing, and even listen to magnetic fields (while debugging circuits). I've occasionally felt a bit envious.
