Hearing Aid Trends: AI, Consumer-Centric Solutions, and Tackling Stigma

Welcome to this Week in Hearing. I’m Shari Eberts co author of Hear & Beyond Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss. And this week our guest is Brian Taylor, senior director of audiology at Signia. Brian is a veteran of the hearing industry with more than 25 years of experience, and he’s a prolific and respected contributor to the industry with numerous publications and speaking engagements worldwide. He is also the editor of Audiology Practices, which is a quarterly journal of the ADA, the editor at large for Hearing Health & Technology Matters, and adjunct instructor at the University of Wisconsin. So thank you, Brian, for being here to discuss consumer issues in the hearing aid market. It’s great to see you. Yah, likewise Shari Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So before we dive into the meat of our discussion, I was hoping you could share a little bit about your backstory. So what got you interested in audiology and how your career path has led you to your current role at Signia? Sure. I have to go back about 35 years to start that conversation that like a lot of people, I kind of stumbled into the profession. I grew up on a farm in a small town in northern Wisconsin. I was one of the first people in my immediate family to go to college and I was looking for a career path. I happened to take an intro to Speech pathology course probably the second semester of my freshman year, took an audiology course, and then before you know it, accumulated enough credits to graduate with a communication disorders degree. And then now I find myself almost 40 years later as an audiologist. And I’ve had the great privilege of working with a lot of bright minds. I’ve learned a lot from both the academic and the clinical and the business part of things. And happy to be with the you here today. Interesting. So you kind of sort of fell into it. It wasn’t a grand life plan. It was not. But you know, I was always interested in like health sciences and you know, engineering. I always had, I love, I was kind of a little bit of a musician and all those things were sort of wrapped into audiology, which I found appealing. Very interesting. Awesome. Well, I’m glad you found your way to the industry. So it’s definitely an interesting time in the world of hearing aids. Right. We probably couldn’t have always send that. But there’s lots of options for consumers. Different price points and different form factors. And even a lot of devices are now making use of AI and other technologies for noise canceling. So maybe can you talk a little bit about what you see as some of the most important trends in the space today. Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more, Shari. This is a really exciting time to be part of the profession. I guess a good place to begin is I think that over the last five or so years you’ve seen this melding of traditional amplification prescription hearing aids morphing with consumer audio devices. And I think there’s a lot of positives that come out of the morphing of those two different spheres of the audio world. I think that if you look, you mentioned artificial intelligence. I think I like to remind people that AI has been in hearing aids for a long, long time. And it is definitely getting smarter. We’re able to do more things. I think that we’re just kind of scratching the surface as, as battery life improves, as computer chips get smaller, I think you’ll see more and more novel approaches to the use of AI and hearing aids. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess that is true. Right. Maybe it just wasn’t called AI. What it was sort analyzing the background sounds all those years. Right. Well, if I could put a plug in for Signia, they brought trainable gain in a hearing aid to market almost 20 years ago. And that is albeit primitive. It is a form of AI. And just like everything else in the technology sector, I think things incrementally improve you know, kind of along the lines of what we know about Moore’s Law. So you know, it’s an exciting time because of those things. Interesting. So the big announcement, I guess of the week or the month or the year, I don’t know. Is the Apple AirPods now launching as an over the counter hearing aid? So what’s your reaction to that? What are your thoughts about that? Well, it’s I think it’s great. You know’s the what’s the cliche? A rising tide lifts all boats. And I think this is a great example of that. I think most, a lot of people know that AirPods has had an amplifier built into at least one of their models for a number of years. And now I guess they’ve gone through the regulatory channels to able to call it a hearing aid. I think it’s a great option for somebody who might be you know, with a mild hearing loss, wants to kind of dabble from the comforts of home. Maybe somebody who is you know, extremely tech savvy, that already might have earbuds or earbuds. So I think it’s great to see that as an option for consumers. Yeah, I find it very exciting. I’m really hoping that it’s gonna get people to take sort of. It won’t feel like a leap but sort of like a baby step into hearing care and maybe they’ll benefit from seeing wow, if I do something I can actually communicate better in different situations. So maybe that’s sort of the platform that gets more people interested in taking care of their hearing. So. Fingers crossed Excellent. So I know Signia recently launched its own sort of earbud style hearing aid, right. It’s called the Active Pro IX. So can you talk a little bit about what led to that product launch and what are some of the benefits for consumers? Sure. I think it’s another example of that morphing of consumer, consumer electronic audio and traditional prescription hearing aids. I think especially when we look at the form factor of the Active Pro IX. We launched the Active Pro about five years ago, that same basic form factor earbud style hearing aid back in I think 2019. So this is I guess you could think of it as maybe a second generation. It’s got the more up to date technology in it. But I think the idea there is to bring another style or form factor to the market that might appeal to somebody who wants a hearing aid that looks more like an earbud and less like a traditional behind the ear. And has it been out long enough that you know sort of the consumer response to it, what’s the feedback that you’ve heard? Well I think that in the United States it doesn’t launch until the middle of November. But I don’t know in Europe where it’s launched. it’s gotten some real good traction there. I think it’s just an, it’s another addition to a broad portfolio of form factors. I think another aspect of it that I don’t want to gloss over is it’s got all of the bells and whistles of a premium prescriptive hearing aid in it. You know I do know if, if you wanna equate it to some of these other earbud style devices like the AirPods Pro you know, that has it has some noise reduction in it. But I think if you look at the Signia Active Pro, the sophistication of the noise reduction algorithms the microphone technology all of that represents what you would find in any premium device that’s on the market. Interesting. Okay, we’ll have to wait for that to check that out. So I personally battled a lot of hearing loss stigma when I first was developing my hearing loss and sort of accepting it and coming out of my hearing loss closet as I talk about it. And I guess. Do you think stigma is still an issue for hearing aid users? And if so, what do you think manufacturers can do to help people move past their resistance because of stigma? I do think that stigma is a real issue. I think that we don’t maybe, maybe I’m speaking personally about this, but as a profession I don’t think that we understand it as well as we should. I think that stigma is part of, probably in a broader context, part of ageism. I think that there’s stigma not only around wearing hearing aids, but I think it’s possible that there’s even more or greater stigma around getting a hearing test and maybe realizing that you might be having trouble with your hearing because you’re getting older. So I think all of those are stigmatizing characteristics that we see. I do know that this is an interesting topic and just about three months ago me and a colleague of mine in Europe who’s a researcher at Signia, his name is Niels Jensen we wrote a long article about stigma that’s at Audiology Online Maybe we can put it in the notes here so people can link it. And the reason I bring that up is because we talk a little bit in that article about some of the approaches that Signia has used within our company to tackle the issues related to stigma. I also want to mention that just recently two peer reviewed publications, both the International Journal of Audiology and Ear and Hearing, have come out with special issues around stigma. I know there’s a renewed emphasis in the academic community to have better tools to measure it to see the impact that stigma might have on somebody’s behaviors and their kind of their outlook and how they might approach acquiring hearing aids. So I guess long story short, there’s a lot for us still to learn. Stigma is still very much is an issue and it’s something that we have looked at quite deeply at Signia. I think that a lot of what has gone into, into the Active Pro, the design of it comes out of our desire to have a device that is not as stigmatizing as Maybe what others are. Right. No, I’m happy as a person with hearing loss. I’m really happy that the industry is taking a lot of interest in this issue because I think it’s something that maybe audiologists don’t see as much because the people that they’re seeing have obviously overcome some level of stigma. Right. To get themselves in the door. So people say, oh, this stigma is going down because they are sort of seeing those people who have been able to get over that. So I’m glad to. That people are taking it seriously as an issue. Exactly. And I just Another, another interesting little wrinkle to this, I think, is, you know, there’s been a lot of great work over the last decade or so around this relationship or this link between hearing loss and cognitive decline in dementia. And I think sometimes the way we talk about that link is kind of a stigmatizing into itself. I mean, a lot of people, I think, are reluctant to get a hearing test because they’re afraid that if they hear they have a hearing loss, they think that that’s a harbinger for them acquiring dementia. And I think that we have to be more responsible in how we communicate that message. No, that’s fair. Because I mean, every article about the Apple announcement or really about hearing aids or hearing loss or anything is always mentioning that factor. And I think it is important for people to understand that link, but also to understand that it’s not a foregone conclusion. Right. It’s not like one leads to the other. It’s sort of like we can take steps to take care of our hearing loss. And by the way, we’re going to make sure that we are healthier because of that and we stay engaged with other people. There’s lots of positives. Exactly. And I think there’s professionals. We need to focus on those positives, like more likely to socialize with people, more active, better thinking. You know, those kinds of things are all associated with better hearing. Absolutely. All right, well, we agree. So we just got to get a newspaper. People too. I know. Well they are always, you know, they want to generate eyeballs and clicks and sometimes they mislead us a little bit with the way they use statistics. Yeah, that’s probably true in lots of, in lots of areas, so. Right. So what else should consumers be thinking about these days when looking at a pair of hearing aids? Well, I think that that’s a great question. I could talk about that for a while. I think one thing that comes to mind is customizability the way that the device fits in your ear you need to be able to wear it well in many cases you need to be able to wear it all day long. Comfortable that requires some custom customizability of the way it fits in the ear and then customizability of the acoustics, the gain, the output noise reduction. Those are things that you know, out of the box in a pair of over the counter hearing aids or a pair of AirPods might be good enough for some people. But for many others I think it’s worth the time and the effort to get a pair of prescription hearing aids that are customized by a licensed hearing care professional. All of those things that I mentioned around acoustics, around the physical fit they cannot be customized without seeing somebody in person fitting you with a pair of prescription devices. So that’s one thing. Another thing is I would. There’s all kinds of really interesting technologies out there today to help people hear better in background noise. You know, every major manufacturer has some version or some flavor of directional microphone technology and what I’ll call process based noise reduction algorithms. And you know those things, those two types of technology are really important. Just to get a little bit more nerdy on you and talk about another study there, there was a guideline published in June of 2023 from the UK fitting guidelines for older adults. And it’s a great article. For those of you that are interested in those kinds of things, one of the solid pieces of evidence based guidance that they recommend is the only way to improve the signal to noise ratio is with directional microphone technology. And the reason I bring that up is there’s a lot of really interesting AI based noise reduction systems out there but they still don’t work as well as good directional microphone systems, bilateral beam forming and that’s what people I think really need when they get into these adverse restaurant situations where the noise and the speech are the same intensity level. So how much of that could a consumer control on their own in real time? Right, so you said it’s important for people to come in and make sure that everything is customized and the noise profiles are customized. But say then I go out to the restaurant and a musician comes and s. It’s a bad experience. How much of that can a consumer control in real time? Yeah, that’s a great question. I think what you’re getting at is sort of the, the intent of the, of the hearing aid wearer or the intent of the listener. Thats something that AI is still not very good at. I think, you know, a great example of that is a person walks into a noisy restaurant where there’s maybe a live band playing. Do they want to sit alone quietly, do they want to have a conversation with their neighbor at the table, or do they want to listen to the music? Well, the hearing aid is capable of maximizing all three of those conditions, but it doesn’t know which one the listener or the where wants. Someday maybe AI will know that. But now that’s an argument for some type of a manual override. So a person could press a button on the hearing aid or perhaps on their smartphone and they could tell the hearing aid what program they want to use in that situation. Yeah, I love that because I think that people really do know what they’re hearing and what they’re experiencing. And so I love that having that little bit of control or, you know, maybe that lot of control over my real experience. I think a lot of consumers enjoy that. Yeah, I think you’re right about that. I think if you look at the MarkeTrak studies that are done over the years, it would they would agree with what you just said. Yeah. Excellent. Okay, well, any other final thoughts that you wanna share about your new product or about the hearing aid market? Yeah, I would be remiss to if I didn’t mention I just mentioned signal to noise ratio. We just published a really interesting study. It was done in a simulated conversational environment where, I mean where we simulated back and forth conversation to people in the front and noise coming primarily from the side or the back of the, of the wearer. And we found that this ix noise reduction algorithm, something we call Real Time Conversation Enhancement, that’s the name of our platform or our processing system. We found that it outperformed in that simulated environment, conversational back and forth environment. It outperformed all other devices by about 3 decibels, which in most cases is a pretty noticeable improvement in background noise. And so we’re pretty proud of that study and we want to make sure that people know that that study is out there. Its been published and people can read it if they want to. Excellent. and we will put a link to that as well so people can make sure they can learn more about that. Great, Excellent. Awesome. Well, thank you so much Brian for being on the podcast day and this in your opposite seat of normal. Always a pleasure, Shari. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. And if people want learn more about Signia’s new products, they can visit Signia.net thank you.