The above graphic demonstrates that hearing aid market penetration rates increase with the severity of hearing problems. OTC hearing aids are designed for those with mild-to-moderate hearing loss (the bottom two-thirds of the pyramid), as well as those who fall outside this diagram—people who do not have an “audiometric hearing loss” but could still benefit from situational help in noisy places. Adapted from Niels Granholm-Leth of Carnegie Investment Bank, WHO, and Sonova.Although Apple AirPods are exceptional audio devices, there is room for improvement if they're to be used as OTC hearing aids. The HearAdvisor lab gave them a SoundScore of 2.9 (out of 5), which isn't bad, but they lag significantly behind the top OTC hearing aids in speech-in-quiet and speech-in-noise scores. Another major improvement would be to incorporate a customized hearing test, like those of Mimi or SonicCloud, to more easily tune the device for users' individual hearing losses. This wouldn't be completely unexpected: in 2018 at WWDC18, an Apple engineer explained how the company’s ResearchKit for software developers uses the Hughson-Westlake pure-tone threshold method, as well as an assessment of the noise level in the test environment. Finally, they could greatly extend battery life beyond 4-5 hours in transparency mode; most hearing aids offer at least 12 hours of service when fully charged.
Apple wouldn't necessarily need to do any of these things. Just having a switch to activate the Hearing Aid Mode could be a game-changer; it would alert millions of users that this useful function exists.
It remains to be seen if Apple will announce a new Hearing Aid Mode in its AirPods and iOS 18 in mid-September. But, if not then, it’s hard to believe it won’t at some date in the near future.
The above is the interpretation of Apple to Launch a “Hearing Aid Mode” for AirPods Pro with iOS 18 Says New Report provided by Chinese hearing aid supplier Shenrui Medical. Link https://www.sengdong.com/Blog/Apple-to-Launch-a-Hearing-Aid-Mode-for-AirPods-Pro-with-iOS-18-Says-New-Report.html of this article is welcome to share and forward. For more hearing aid related information, please visit Blog or take a look at our Hearing aids products
