This and that

I don’t have many activities in the hearing aid field going on myself, but since I still follow the news in the field and receive pointers here and there, I thought, I’ll write up some of the interesting stuff.

I mailed with Frank Swain, who is a journalist wearing hearing aids. He made a piece about the process of becoming hearing impaired and getting hearing aids which was recently broadcast by the BBC and can still be streamed here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03nt1st (it even works from outside the UK). I liked the piece very much, because it includes some nice sound samples how it sounds when you are hearing impaired and when you get hearing aids. Frank’s home page is: www.frankswain.com
Apparently hearing aid case modding is a thing: http://deathsplaining.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/colour-run-for-colourful-ears/
There is a company called Audiotoniq which claims to sell hearing aids which you can tune yourself. Unfortunately, this hasn’t hit the German market yet, as I would love to try their products: http://www.audiotoniq.com/
Deutschland radio, a popular German radio station also made a piece about hearing loss and hearing aids. It also includes some nice sound samples. Unfortunately, the piece is only available in German though: http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/radiolexikon-gesundheit-hoergeraete.709.de.html?dram:article_id=283347
I recently had a chat with Philipp from Mimi Technologies, a startup based in Berlin. They are developing a smartphone app that is entering the hearing aid market. It offers various hearing tests that you can do to do a self-assessment of your (or your granny’s hearing loss). The next stage will be to combine it with actual hearing aid hardware. They recently entered TechCrunch’s Disrupt competition. See their presentation here http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/06/the-6-disrupt-ny-finalists-boomerang-commerce-isi-technology-mimi-mink-showkit-and-vurb/ They are also looking for Android developers to bring their Android version forward. If you are interested, let Philipp know 🙂
Also, Mimi technologies hired a familiar face: Nick from Bioaid is on board as well.
Alexander Goersdorf is a hearing impaired person from Germany who wrote a book about what it is like to be hearing impaired. It’s called “Taube Nuss” (which is a swear word literally translated to “deaf nut”). See this promotional video on Youtube about him and his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVPpKLu2bj8&feature=youtu.be (Video and book are in German.)
There is a German community called “cyborgs e.V.” whose goal (among others) is to hack protheses and implants. Interesting! http://cyborgs.cc
Resound announce “Resound Linx”, a hearing aid ready to use in connection with an IPhone. While I welcome the general development towards integration with smartphones, I dislike that IPhones are always the first model they go for. Hearing aids are expensive enough as such, I would not want to spend an extra 500 dollars for the phone. http://www.resoundlinx.com/en/International/Welcome
As far as I know, there are a couple of projects aiming for turning a phone into a hearing aid, most recently I stumbled upon this project: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/07/02/197639536/to-make-hearing-aids-affordable-firm-turns-on-bluetooth?utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=20130707&utm_source=mostemailed
Another project aiming for reducing the costs of hearing aids dramatically: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-first-affordable-invisible-hearing-aid-with-superior-sound-by-ihear
And because I am too lazy to comment on everything, a few more interesting links:

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