During the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Jacoti, bvba of Belgium, was named a CES 2016 Innovation Awards honoree. The company won for its Jacoti Hearing Suite.
Judging from its press releases and website, Jacoti has a clear mission of bringing hearing self-testing and amplification apps directly to consumers and is on track to do so. HHTM has been tracking the progress of this company since October 2013 and reviewed their progress in bringing products to market in August, 2015.
Home Hearing Testing; Mobile Apps
According to Jacoti’s website, the Hearing Suite is a set of cloud-enabled mobile applications providing individuals – “from people with normal hearing to those with profound hearing losses – universal hearing support with reliability and capabilities far beyond existing and expensive hearing aids and assistive listening devices.”
The Jacoti Hearing Suite consists of several interconnected applications intended to improve hearing and communications for both adults and children.
- Jacoti Hearing Center is a patented and FDA registered self-test hearing application.
- Jacoti ListenApp is a medically certified hearing aid application
- Jacoti Lola Classroom is being billed as an assistive listening solution for classrooms, meeting rooms and lecture halls. It provides lowlatency multi-peer audio streaming over consumer-grade Wi-Fi. It appears the Jacoti Lola will be marketed to both adults and children with hearing loss, and those with normal hearing who may struggle in background noise.
- myJacoti is a web service that allows users to store their audio profiles in the cloud, share them across devices, and connect to a remote hearing professional for remote fitting assistance.
All three components of the Hearing Suite, the ListenApp, Hearing Center and Lola Classroom are available from the Apple App Store.
Unlike other types of direct to consumer hearables, consumer electronics manufacturers can license Jacoti’s IP-protected technologies and incorporate them into their own products.
The Jacoti Hearing Suite is billed on their website as “a concrete solution that is on the forefront of the shift from a product-based to a user-centered services model in hearing health,” thus it is attempting to address some of the purported shortcomings in the current marketplace, which were outlined in the recent President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report.
To learn more about Jacoti’s range of technologies, view this YouTube video from CES:
Jacoti, bvba is a privately held hearing technology company with offices in Wevelgem, Belgium and in Barcelona, Spain.
