[Elecraft] FS: New CM500 headset

[David Woolley]

The National Health Service in the UK tends to use slightly modified 
commercial designs that are maybe a couple of years old, and their input 
costs are something like that.

However, I don't think self fitting would be allowed in the UK, as 
setting the gain too high can cause unnecessary damage to residual 
hearing, and many new users would set it too low to be effective. 
Mobile phones are also not accurately calibrated.  The other reason for 
not allowing self fitting of real hearing aids is that hearing loss can 
be a warning of more serious things, like brain tumours, and a proper 
audiologist will refer patients for more detailed investigation if there 
are hints of that.

Also, this is only going to work with open fit aids.  You can have just 
a few sizes of fitting.  They do tend to work well for people with age 
related loss, where most of the loss is in the high frequencies.  People 
with more complex losses require custom made ear moulds, and the most 
difficult cases actually require aids that change the frequency of the 
sounds.

It looks like Olive only address the easy end of the market.  I'm not 
even sure it would be classified as a hearing aid in the UK (hearing 
aids are prescription only - RX Only in US terms).  I can find none of 
the technical documentation that I would expect for a normal aid, and, 
in particular, I can find no graphs showing the performance envelope. 
It looks like it has something more like an in the ear headphone fitting 
than the sort of fitting you would expect on a normal hearing aid.

It has enough output to damage hearing if used incorrectly.

It looks to only have one microphone, and loss of directionality is one 
of the big problems with using hearing aids.  Multiple microphones allow 
some beam forming.

Hearing aid pricing is complex, because the marginal cost of manufacture 
is quite low, but there are are high R&D costs for the noise reduction 
and automatic adaptation.  A lot of the R&D will be recovered by private 
buyers paying a large premium for the latest technology (a bit like 
films take a lot from theatre audiences, but eventually are sold cheaply 
to TV stations).  Also the service costs in prescribing and maintaining 
can be high.  For the NHS these dominate the cost of the physical 
instruments.

-- 
David Woolley


On 28/11/2018 02:48, John Simmons wrote:
> A friend of mine told me about the new Olive hearing aids coming from S. 
> Korea. They are currently being sold only on Indiegogo and one ear is 
> $139 instead of the multikilobuck jobs. I'm interested to hear how they 
> work for him. You configure the amplification and response curves using 
> a smartphone app.
>