{"id":13190,"date":"2022-05-30T15:36:22","date_gmt":"2022-05-30T15:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/?p=13190"},"modified":"2023-09-26T15:30:04","modified_gmt":"2023-09-26T15:30:04","slug":"hearing-health-news-may-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/hearing-health-news-may-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Hearing Health News – May ’22"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Bose may be getting out of the hearing aid business<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On May 3 the Boston Globe broke the news<\/a> that Bose has been cutting jobs and is shifting its focus to its \u2018most popular\u2019 products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the report, several former employees said that the most recent layoffs eliminated Bose\u2019s health division\u2014a group that had been working on the Bose SoundControl\u2122 hearing aids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The report states that an independent review of Bose\u2019s business strategy determined that \u201cBose should no longer be selling hearing aids.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The timing of this is interesting. Bose lobbied for over-the-counter hearing aids for years, and the FDA is expected to issue their final rules for OTC hearing aids by fall of this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s unclear if this means the end of Bose\u2019s involvement in the hearing aid business altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SoundControl\u2122 hearing aids are still available for sale on Bose\u2019s website at a reduced price, and HearingTracker has speculated<\/a> that Bose\u2019s hearing aid technology may live on to power the hardware of another brand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Bose\u2019s hearing aid is in the discreet and most popular receiver-in-canal style, but it has been widely criticized for lacking rechargeability and Bluetooth connectivity.<\/em>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To many in the hearing aid industry, this wasn\u2019t shocking news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bose had a premise\u2014lower the price of hearing aids and make them easier to buy and higher adoption rates will follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But time and time again, that premise has proven false, as price is just one factor that contributes to low hearing aid adoption rates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many companies before Bose tried to enter the hearing aid business under the same premise, and eventually bowed out- Bausch & Lam, RCA Labs, Doppler Labs, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Panasonic, the list goes on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s why in last month\u2019s blog<\/a> we stated that even after the FDA issues its final rule on OTC hearing aids, \u201cit\u2019s unclear how this bill will actually change the hearing aid industry or adoption rates.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When this news broke, Starkey President Brandon Sawalich had this to say\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/i>

Consumer electronics companies continue to overlook an important aspect of our industry: the art and science that goes into treating hearing loss. <\/p>

\"\"

Brandon Sawalich<\/h4>President, Starkey Hearing Technologies<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The report doesn\u2019t state what led Bose to this decision, but we\u2019re guessing that it has to do with a lack of demand, coupled with the high amount of service and maintenance required on hearing aids post-purchase (as Sawalich alludes to above).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noopl suspending sales of their background noise reducing iPhone accessory<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On 5\/11 Noopl announced via a message on their website<\/a> that they were suspending all sales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noopl was a company, and a product, that created a novel device to improve the signal to noise ratio for folks in noisy environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, it helped people understand speech in noisy environments like restaurants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Connecting to an iPhone via the Lightning plug, Noopl utilized a 3-microphone beamforming array with the unique head-tracking technology built into Apple Airpods Pro.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Although it was only a viable product for a handful of use cases (like noisy restaurants), at a price point of $199, Noopl was a good affordable alternative to hearing aids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As evidenced by the departures of Bose and Noopl, the OTC hearing aid market is going to be a real challenge for companies to get right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019ll be interesting to see if these decisions by Bose and Noopl have a chilling effect on other companies considering entering the market when the final rules are issued on OTC hearing aids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amazon’s Fire TV Cube becomes first-ever US streaming media player to support audio streaming for hearing aids<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Amazon Fire TV recently announced<\/a> Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids (ASHA) on Fire TV Cube for compatible Starkey Bluetooth hearing aids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This makes Fire TV the first-ever streaming media player to support ASHA and allow customers to directly connect compatible Bluetooth hearing aids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If you have just about any wireless Starkey hearing aid<\/a> from within the last 3-4 years, that means that with an Amazon Fire TV Cube, you can now stream audio directly from the TV to your hearing aids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some guidance on how to make this work, head over to Amazon\u2019s blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We hope to see more streaming media players support ASHA in the near future, this will reduce customers’ reliance on proprietary streamers from hearing aid manufacturers, which are expensive, and currently very hard to get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New COVID-19 lockdowns in China renewing hearing aid industry supply chain issues<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For a while there, it seemed like the hearing aid industry was ridding itself of the supply chain issues that it\u2019s been fraught with since February 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, recent lockdowns in China have exacerbated the problem, and just about every hearing aid manufacturer is having issues supplying some of their products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the month of May we saw several manufacturers unable to ship certain colors of hearing aids for weeks on end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TV streamers, chargers, and accessories like remote microphones are still in incredibly short supply, with some fetching outrageous prices on sites like eBay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It appears we\u2019re going to be stuck in sort of a holding pattern for some time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bose may be getting out of the hearing aid business On May 3 the Boston Globe broke the news that Bose has been cutting jobs and is shifting its focus to its \u2018most popular\u2019 products. According to the report, several former employees said that the most recent layoffs eliminated Bose\u2019s health division\u2014a group that had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":13193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/bose-sound-control-hearing-aids.png?fit=600%2C511&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13190"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13879,"href":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13190\/revisions\/13879"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ziphearing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}