US Hearing Aid/Device Patents for September and October 2013

Another bunch of patents compiled, with a few notes of varying importance.

• Important: “Hearing aid” and “hearing device” are quickly becoming inadequate to capture innovations and new players in the ear-level communication field.  Patent applications are proliferating from a variety of sources for diverse technologies and methodologies (e.g., Patent Application 20130272555).  It’s tempting to include them in the Table, but it’s too long already.
• Time will tell if this is important:  Panasonic garnered a bunch of patents and they did it in record time on most.  I don’t know why Panasonic gets their applications through faster than others.  I also don’t know whether Panasonic cares much, since they sold their Healthcare business unit for $1.67B on October 3rd  to giant US private equity company Kolberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P.  (KKR).  The deal (set to finalize next March) includes patents and other intellectual property. KKR is interested in the “expanding global healthcare market” which probably means focusing on Panasonic’s big sellers (e.g., blood glucose monitors for diabetes).  They may exit the hearing aid market but one hearing aid market report speculates that if KKR picks up the hearing aid portion, “only time will tell whether they plan to continue utilizing traditional distribution channels or redirect their efforts toward a direct-to-consumer strategy.”
• Important to me: I vote for Starkey patent #8542841 .  Anything that reduces time, expense, cumbersomeness and calibration contortions of Real Ear in the clinic gets my vote.  Measuring SPL at the patient’s  tympanic membrane through their own hearing aid as part of the fitting has been a long time coming.
• Is this important?  US Patent #8545383 is for a “Light Activated Hearing Aid.”  Must be more to that than meets the eye, so to speak, but the title disconcerts.

Increasingly, the titles of hearing aid patents include the word “Method” as inventions move from things-you-can-stick-in-your-ear to ideas about such things.  Programming and software are the stuff of patents now, which takes me briefly back to that recurring theme of patent trolls and patent infringement.

Check out this fascinating NPR podcast about patent attacks, featuring a cameo by Steven Colbert as well as interesting terms such as “shake-down,”  “protection,”  “get money”  and companies with names like “Bullet Proof Technologies of Texas.”  Sounds like an episode of  The Sopranos, set out west and starring Ira Glass.  As this hilarious quote from the show says, the podcast itself was a patent infringement:

Personal Audio … claims it holds a patent used by all podcasters. Podcasters, they say, owe them money. Only catch: their company never made a digital podcast or invented a way to download it into a listening device.

 editor’s note:  The Patent Series is updated every two months.  Click links for patents approved in Jan/Feb 2014, Nov/Dec 2013, September/October 2013, Jul/Aug 2013, May/Jun 2013, Mar/Apr 2013, Jan/Feb 2013, Nov/Dec 2012

image courtesy of intangible.me