Why Are Hearing Aids So Expensive?
>Experts don’t know exactly why hearing aids are still so costly<p>No, they do.<p>The short answer is: you need to develop your own custom IC's
that 1) have analog circuitry 2) support Telecoil[1] - an ancient induction standard from the 1970's 3) are made by 1 of 4 companies in Copenhagen or Switzerland - one of which has 55% market share and 4) run on fumes. Seriously, the crest factor on these is ridiculous.<p>The long answer is available in this great podcast episode: <a href="https://theamphour.com/338-an-interview-with-jorgen-jakobsen/" rel="nofollow">https://theamphour.com/338-an-interview-with-jorgen-jakobsen...</a><p>Of course, Bluetooth alternatives to hearing aids are being developed. People in the industry know this and joke about it. But, crucially, they can't be called "hearing aids". It's a protected term. An interesting example are Bose's new $500 "Hearphones" strongly targeted at an older demographic[2] with features like Bluetooth and tunable noise cancellation based off their earlier $300 QC30 dynamic noise cancelling platform. But also not the exact same use case. More power intensive. More capable. But less endurance.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_aid#Telecoil" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_aid#Telecoil</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/headphones/conversation_enhancing_headphones/hearphones.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/headphones/conversation_...</a>