Years ago, someone from Stanford was invited to give a talk on his work at Xerox Parc, the research institute that was the West Coast’s version of Bell Labs. Bernard Widrow, who would be in his 90s now, was an electrical engineer trying to improve the hearing aids of the day.
He had designed a sort of necklace with seven microphones in it that were programmed to sync with one’s aids, picking up sound directionally and from the circular width of one’s chest rather than just what hits that tiny opening in the plastic in your ear. He told of trying it out on a patient with severe hearing loss on busy El Camino Real and she found she could hear every word he was saying, even against the traffic.
She burst into tears when he told her it was just a prototype and he couldn’t sell her one yet. But he was looking.
He asked for volunteers and I figured I was the deafest person in the audience. He had me try it out. So then I too desperately wanted one of those.
But no hearing aid company took it on and that was that. For awhile I was told you could go to him and have him custom-make you one but memory says it was $6000 and that was when we had four kids to send off to college soon.
That was a keenly missed opportunity.
The New Yorker has a story about an inventor who had watched his grandparents losing their hearing, their social lives, and then their brains to dementia. Note that he says they had hearing aids, but they refused to wear them. I’m guessing nobody explained recruitment to them, how brains overreact to sounds they’re not used to being able to hear and you just have to slog through the first few months of everything sounding painfully loud before normal dB levels feel normal.
He helped develop a portable sonar medical device that was highly successful, while wishing he could do more about how limited hearing aids were. The one gave him the cred and the wherewithal to eventually tackle the other.
And so he had video made of taking someone out in the middle of a busy city street with construction going on right behind him to test out what he and his Fortell team had come up with. He demonstrated what it sounds like in the mode that most hearing aids operate in.
And then with his AI.
Most of the other sound vanished, leaving his voice far more audible.
This time, I was the hearing-impaired person looking at the roadway trying not to burst into unexpected tears.
My first reaction was, well, that’s worth a trip to New York.
My second was to check where they might have expanded to.
Dude.
I guess their venture capitalists had to have a Silicon Valley location: that’s where the old Radio Shack building used to be, right down the street from Richard’s old office. Opening up next spring.
Now, that’s convenient!
Richard, who has heard the spiels of many a product manager by now, had been listening to the video from the other room.
He said “that incorporating AI into the aids” thing–you can’t take it up into the Cloud and back in real time for your ears fast enough. He was pretty sure that although they might have some really good programming, it’s probably not more or at least not much more than what I’ve already got. Color him skeptical.
So this is a great big To Be Continued. But man, it’s great to have hope. If nothing else, some good competition will light a fire under the industry.