The National Health Service in the UK tends to use slightly modified
commercial designs that are maybe a couple of years old, and their input
costs are something like that.
However, I don't think self fitting would be allowed in the UK, as
setting the gain too high can cause unnecessary damage to residual
hearing, and many new users would set it too low to be effective.
Mobile phones are also not accurately calibrated. The other reason for
not allowing self fitting of real hearing aids is that hearing loss can
be a warning of more serious things, like brain tumours, and a proper
audiologist will refer patients for more detailed investigation if there
are hints of that.
Also, this is only going to work with open fit aids. You can have just
a few sizes of fitting. They do tend to work well for people with age
related loss, where most of the loss is in the high frequencies. People
with more complex losses require custom made ear moulds, and the most
difficult cases actually require aids that change the frequency of the
sounds.
It looks like Olive only address the easy end of the market. I'm not
even sure it would be classified as a hearing aid in the UK (hearing
aids are prescription only - RX Only in US terms). I can find none of
the technical documentation that I would expect for a normal aid, and,
in particular, I can find no graphs showing the performance envelope.
It looks like it has something more like an in the ear headphone fitting
than the sort of fitting you would expect on a normal hearing aid.
It has enough output to damage hearing if used incorrectly.
It looks to only have one microphone, and loss of directionality is one
of the big problems with using hearing aids. Multiple microphones allow
some beam forming.
Hearing aid pricing is complex, because the marginal cost of manufacture
is quite low, but there are are high R&D costs for the noise reduction
and automatic adaptation. A lot of the R&D will be recovered by private
buyers paying a large premium for the latest technology (a bit like
films take a lot from theatre audiences, but eventually are sold cheaply
to TV stations). Also the service costs in prescribing and maintaining
can be high. For the NHS these dominate the cost of the physical
instruments.
--
David Woolley
On 28/11/2018 02:48, John Simmons wrote:
A friend of mine told me about the new Olive hearing aids coming from S.
Korea. They are currently being sold only on Indiegogo and one ear is
$139 instead of the multikilobuck jobs. I'm interested to hear how they
work for him. You configure the amplification and response curves using
a smartphone app.
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