Empowered Patient Podcast Independent Evaluation and Ranking of Over-the-Counter Hearing Aids for Specific Kinds of Hearing Loss with Steve Taddei HearAdvisor
Steve Taddei, Co-Founder and Lab Director of HearAdvisor created to provide unbiased, scientifically-based analysis of over-the-counter hearing aids. With recent legislation allowing hearing aids to be sold directly to consumers and online, there is a need for a clear understanding of the features and benefits of available audio-enhancing technology. Using a life-like mannequin equipped with microphones, HearAdvisor can perform repeatable experiments to test the hearing aids across several categories and rank them for different purposes.
Steve explains, "Selecting devices that we found to perform best was quite a process, and I would like to say that HearAdvisor is an independent lab. We are not owned by any hearing aid company. We're kind of three hearing technology nerds or just audiology nerds, people who love sound, acoustics, and hearing. We saw this problem, we came together, and we used as best as possible, the scientific approach to make recordings of all these devices. These recordings emulate, as best as possible, what an individual may experience in the real world."
"So, multi-talker situations where you have one, two, or three people speaking, with various types and levels of background noise. We make recordings with all the technologies, and we measure their performance through several different metrics. We don't need to get into all of them, but for example, algorithms that predict how well an individual with hearing loss might be able to hear speech in background noise."
"Then we have an industry-standard mannequin, and the mannequin's name is KEMAR. It's an acronym for the product, but this mannequin emulates the average size shape of a human head and body, and it has little microphones where the eardrums are. So it's very similar and when we make recordings from our eight-speaker array, as it's called through our mannequin KEMAR, it emulates you sitting in that environment."
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