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Hearing Aids and Auditory Rehabilitation
Published in R James A England, Eamon Shamil, Rajeev Mathew, Manohar Bance, Pavol Surda, Jemy Jose, Omar Hilmi, Adam J Donne, Scott-Brown's Essential Otorhinolaryngology, 2022
These same basic physical components are used in some multifunction, non-professionally fitted, wearable devices, termed hearables. There is a current merging of these device types, as the hearables add amplification to their features, and hearing aids add other features such as fall detection, telephone hands-free operation and step counting.
Terms, Regulations, and Concepts in Telehealth and Audiology
Published in Stavros Hatzopoulos, Andrea Ciorba, Mark Krumm, Advances in Audiology and Hearing Science, 2020
Telecare: Telecare normally implies the use of remote monitoring and sensors with clients. For example, telecare is used to monitor heart rates of patients in their homes who have heart disease. Once criteria and are exceeded, a physician or other practitioners will be alerted and respond to the client with appropriate intervention. Likely, hearing aids will be used in the future for telecare to measure a variety of healthcare applications as the outer ear is a rich source for measurement of vital signs due to its vascular nature (Artiques, 2016). The reader is also directed to an interesting article by Stabb (2016) which also points to the possible applications of “hearable” devices that are capable of measuring vital signs and which can be used simultaneously for amplification. Consequently, it is likely that hearing aids in the future will measure physiological signs which provide information about the physical and psychological well-being of clients.
Mobile health and its problems
Published in Lester D. Friedman, Therese Jones, Routledge Handbook of Health and Media, 2022
In the area of hearing, mobile apps and hearables have been understood as threatening the oligopolistic and vertically integrated hearing aid industry, dominated by five global companies making 90 percent of all hearing aids (Seelman and Werner; Hunn; Oliver). The industry has featured “high margins, considerable barriers to entry, limited power among suppliers and lack of substitutes” (Keppeler, cited in Seelman and Werner). While personal sound amplification technologies – such as hunting earpieces – have long been available commercially, changes in regulation within the United States in 2017 to allow over-the-counter sales of amplification devices for people with mild to moderate hearing loss have created new markets (not to mention a blizzard of TV and newspaper ads touting them) (Zeng; Oliver). The role and status of hearing health professionals like audiologists are shifting in the midst of these changes. Where in the past hearing aids were a stigmatized technology associated with old age and disability and reluctantly used by those under the sign of a medical diagnosis of “hearing impairment” or “hearing loss,” increasingly mainstream communication tech, such as earbuds, are converging with hearing aids. Music, audio, and phone calls can be streamed to Bluetooth enabled hearing aids as easily as wireless headphones. A new market has been created for hearables – earbuds with in-built sensors which are in effect a two-way “smart wearable human-computer interface” (Hagood, “Here Active Listening” 278). Hearables are now an increasing share of the mHealth market (Gilmore; Hagood, Hush: Media; Llamas, Ubrani and Shirer), gathering biometric data from their wearers. This kind of data, drawn from both wearables and apps, is seen as so commodifiable that it has been described as “the new oil” by many observers (Couldry and Mejias).
Hearables, in-ear sensing devices for bio-signal acquisition: a narrative review
Published in Expert Review of Medical Devices, 2021
Colver Ken Howe Ne, Jameel Muzaffar, Aakash Amlani, Manohar Bance
Assessing and monitoring the physiological and neural signals of individuals over extended periods of time and in a variety of settings, including the community, is key to the operation of future health systems. “Hearables’ are wearable electronic devices that can be placed in, on or around the ear. In some publications they are termed ‘earables,’ but we will use Hearables as our nomenclature here, as more publications appear under this name. They can be used for a wide range of purposes, including health monitoring by recording bio-physiological signals. It is an appealing technology for use in areas where portable, discreet and user-friendly monitoring is advantageous over conventional means of physiological signal acquisition. These include ambulatory monitoring, sports medicine, sleep monitoring/staging and occupational medicine [1]. Furthermore, electroencephalography (EEG) based brain monitoring has also been investigated for several emerging interactive applications like brain–computer interface (BCI) and biometric authentication [2,3].
Adults who report difficulty hearing speech in noise: an exploration of experiences, impacts and coping strategies
Published in International Journal of Audiology, 2019
Jermy Pang, Elizabeth Francis Beach, Megan Gilliver, Ingrid Yeend
Participants in the study showed some willingness to consider the use of assistive listening devices and phone app technology, which is likely to be welcome news for developers of personal sound amplification technologies (or ‘hearables’). These devices, with their modern designs and mobile-phone compatibility, are more often compared to high-end headphones than stigma-laden hearing aids. As a result, they are likely to be more palatable to those who experience difficulties in background noise, but are not yet in the market for conventional hearing aids. Research on the use of these devices in normal hearers is starting to emerge (Shaw 2014; Viets 2015), but further research on the efficacy, utility and desirability of such devices for people with listening-in-noise difficulties is needed.