The evolving hearing aid industry was the subject of a nearly 10-minute in-depth feature on CBS Sunday Morning. David Pogue, tech critic for Yahoo Finance, talked to several respected industry figures, including Starkey executives Bill Austin and Achin Bhowmik, about recent technological breakthroughs in hearing aids.
A substantial portion of the television news magazine piece was devoted to the affordability and accessibility of current hearing aids. Frank Lin and Nick Reed of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD provided commentary on OTC hearing aids and offered examples of technology upstarts bringing new OTC products to the market.
At the end of the broadcast Pogue’s 90-year-old father weighs in on the importance of hearing aids in his own day-to-day life.
The entire segment can be viewed here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hearing-aids-you-aint-heard-nothing-yet/
I am amazed that such educated professionals are spewing so much non sense about hearing loss. The fact is that cortical processing of incoming impulses gets immediately affected by loss of threshold values that currently exist in the long term memory storages, and cannot be properly cross referred to due to distortion in the action potentials taking place in the ribbon synapses (synaptopathy). This is the start of degradation in the cochlea and begins at least 10 years before proper identification of the established hearing loss. To say that a patient can get away with cheap hearing aids is adding insult to the injury of the processing mechanism. The hearing aids should assist the brain at the CA complex (hippocampus) and this requires sophisticated sensors to separate incoming sound patterns for easier processing at this critical complex. Such cheap hearing aids will make the hearing issues worse, and affect brain performance even more. Please provide me the feedback on my comments as this is far worse than the existing technological effects on the neural and cortical mechanisms.
thank you,
Jay Muhury.
Auditory Research(Neuroscience)
Hearing Aid Specialist.