Take Phillips, I remember in the early days I fitted the Phillips Faro, they did have a Cochlear implants to.
At the time 3M also had a line of hearing devices as well a RION (Japanese)
I had seen Panasonic Hearing devices, at the time there weren’t RIC they did sound terrible.
Building hearing devices takes multiple teams of talented people…
It is getting more and more complex
This is a good question about Don Schum. But may I digress for a moment?
The first person to leave Oticon to work on the Whisper hearing aids project was Andreas Thelander Bertelsen. Not as prominent a name as Don Scum, Bertelsen is an engineer with significant background in AI applications to hearing aids.
Why do I bring up Andreas Bertelsen? Because he too is now working for Meta. Something’s going on at Meta that we ought to know more about.
Sometimes these happen as an ‘ideas vehicle’ with the intent that they are going to get bought out. I can see certain Engineers who’ve been rebuffed by corporate on a project that they think is their ‘baby’. They go it alone with external funding and then the value of their proposition becomes evident in terms of the original product area or elsewhere.
It’s classic ‘spinoff’ territory.
Okay. But then, why Schum? It’s the two of them going to Meta that has me intrigued.
Here’s an example of something that’s going on there:
Might have been working on a project while at Oticon that had legs (in their mind).Given the requirement to map the incoming ‘patterns’ quickly for AI to work, something like working out a step like MPeg at the front end of the AI engine could have been it. Given the power/processing/practicality limits of hearing aids it might not have been possible to use it within Oticon, but as part of Meta - that’s a whole other Universe.
Whisper struck me as likely being this sort of enterprise right from the start. I think it was an intriguing design.
Can Whisper still be updated if your hearing changes or are they stuck as they are? Eventually or maybe already the app will stop working but you can change volume with the brain?
Whisper hearing aids can no longer be updated. Yes, you can change the volume, but you can’t reprogram them.
Was the fitting software a web app? Or something someone may have access to?
Can you try to describe how the aids sound different when the brain is nearby versus when out of range of the brain?
Fitting software was not a web app. Only the audiologist had access to it.
The primary benefit of the brain is in noisy environments. I always had the brain with me in those environments, so I cannot make a comparison of hearing wit and without the brain.
no message after all etc etc