Starkey Edge AI

I'm founder and host , Blaise Delfino , and , as a friendly reminder , this podcast is separate from my work at Starkey . You're tuned in to the Hearing Matters Podcast . I'm your host , Blaise Delfino , and joining me on this Hearing Matters Brief is our very own co-host , Dr Douglas L Beck . Doug , welcome to the Hearing Matters Podcast .

Doug , bring us through your experience . You are pretty stoked to be talking about this . I know you were telling us on the phone .

No , it's been out there six or seven years . But the early forms of deep neural network were trained on millions of speech sounds , which is brilliant . But then you know , if a sound in the environment was beyond that training , it couldn't necessarily process that as well as something it had been trained on .

So I went up to Storkey and was fitted with my very dear old friend Bill Austin . He did my fitting along with Dr Kent , and I knew immediately something was different . I'm walking around saying hi to people and I'm pressing buttons on my phone because it's a new app .

I wasn't familiar with it and I was learning to use it and all of a sudden I noticed how much more clear sound was . Now let me say this After 40 years as an audiologist , I would tell you that there are many people who need sound louder , but the vast majority of people with hearing and listening problems need sound clearer and this is important .

So it's not just making it louder , it's separating the speech from the noise . It's called the signal to noise ratio . We want to get the speech substantially louder than the background noise . So I put these things on and I'm walking around the building and I'm noticing a different perception of my own . My hearing loss is a little bit different for most people .

Even though I have a mild to moderate sensory neural loss , I have an asymmetry which means that the one ear is different than the other ear and so it's a little bit difficult to fit . But it's not horrible to fit . I mean , any trained hearing care professional can do that in a matter of minutes .

But if you don't put in the work it's not going to work out . So my primary issue is not loudness , it's clarity , and when I got these the world was much clearer . I found that to be true at a football stadium , at dinner with friends and colleagues and when I was on the plane on the way home . The Bluetooth was spectacular .

You know I was able to watch a movie on my phone and really hear quite clearly . You know the noise reduction spectacular . You know , I was able to watch a movie on my phone and really hear quite clearly . You know the noise reduction was very good , but the more important thing to me was the overall processing .

You know I had read about the deep neural network being about 100 times faster . I read about the fact that the hearing aid is waterproof down to about one meter .

It has Bluetooth , of course , but the single most important factor for me is if you put all that together , that's great , but I need long streaming and in other words , I stream almost all day long . This new product , the Starkey Edge AI , has a battery life that's 51 hours .

So I went up there to Minneapolis and I was fitted by Bill Austin , probably the world's most experienced hearing aid dispenser , and my ear molds are perfect and everything went great . And then , as I'm walking around the building , I'm starting to realize how much clearer speech sounds are for me .

People would call me from across the way to say hey , doug , how are you doing ? And I could maintain directional sound . I had localization ability and everything was clear . But it really came into focus for me that evening because we had a big event at the Vikings football stadium . So we're all there .

It's obviously a terrible acoustic environment , although a beautiful stadium and we had dinner there , and I'm having dinner with some of my friends and colleagues and I could understand every word , which rarely happens at this stage in my life .

So it was a marked difference between the other hearing aids that make things louder and this one , which is processing sound , allowing me to hear more clearly .

And what was really interesting was when we were having dinner at the Viking Stadium . It was you , andrew Bellavia , sherry Eberts and Gail Hannon . I'm , of course , observing how you're doing with your technology . It might be a hearing care professional thing . You were so engaged .

I saw you using your app to find the best setting , which was , for lack of a better term , so cool to see , because prior to wearing the Starkey Edge AI , you were wearing Starkey Genesis IIC . They're not Bluetooth compatible with your phone . Now you are in the driver's seat . What is that experience like ?

When I was getting programmed , initially Dr Ken Collins had programmed in two really good programs and they were great , and then I programmed in two others after he left the office and so between those four programs I was able to follow the conversation .

I was able to adapt the hearing aids to the situation and the hearing aids do a quick acoustic analysis to see what's going on .

I don't like to show people that I have hearing loss , but now , if you can just show our viewers now , you're wearing receiver in the canal or RIC hearing aids with custom ear molds . What made you make the decision to move forward now with a device that is still incredibly discreet but people can see that , oh , he's wearing hearing aids ?

Affordability not such a great job because they're so expensive . The OTCs the better ones , but the reason that most people don't seek hearing health care is , to me , neither of those . It's the issue of cosmetics and stigma , and you know there's lots of proof of that .

I mean , we can go back to the 2017 article by Mike Valente and Amin Amlani , where they said you know , even if hearing aids were free , most people wouldn't want them , and they have evidence of this because you look at places like the EU , the UK , you look at New Zealand , australia , canada , where hearing aids are essentially free for the population , to the

citizens . Hearing aids are essentially free for the population , to the citizens , and the uptake is about 40% . In other words , 60% of people say , even if they're free , no thanks . So I think cosmetics is actually a huge issue and I don't think that that's addressed by access and affordability . So in my mind there's three parts to this .

I am just not that handsome of a guy , so if I have something like big and clunky over here , I feel Are you saying that we have faces for radio Doug ? We have faces for radio mostly Jeez man , and we're follically challenged .

But then again , going back to this technology , the technology that attracted me to this product is not available in an IIC . You have all sorts of issues with antennas , you have real estate issues where you can't pack that much stuff into a tiny little hearing aid .

So all of those things combined and then I thought if this is really really super good , I'm going to wear it all day long and that would make a huge difference to me . So having a custom fit ear mold and having this type of technology and , most importantly , having this result , it makes you worthwhile .

So I'm willing to trade off because it is a physically reasonable , attractive product , having that rather than calling attention to itself .

I've been wearing hearing aids on and off for 20 or 30 years now and you know I wear these all day and you know it's kind of surprising at the end of the day . Oh yeah , I got to take that out .

It was a great experience . I learned a lot and the outcome has been spectacular .