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Technology
Could Your Hearing Aids Be Airpods?
Changes in Accessibility in IOS 15 hold out some hope
Hearing aids have been ridiculously expensive for years now because laws prevented OTC (over the counter) sales. While we all may understand that this was for legitimate consumer protection, hearing aid manufacturers did take full advantage of a restricted market. When you think about the cost of a cheap pair of earbuds, you realize how much profit is built into the price of hearing aids. Certainly, there is more to a hearing aid than what you’d find in a pair of convenience store earbuds, but is there really THAT much more? Electronics are cheap and get more powerful every year. There is no legitimate reason for hearing aids to cost so much.
That leaves the question of tuning. Does an audiologist provide technical skill in testing your hearing? Perhaps so, but most of that is done by a computer now — I didn’t think my wife’s audiologist did much more than hook up headphones. So is there any reason the computer in her purse couldn’t tune properly designed OTC hearing aids?
Congress decided that there is not and has told the FDA to draw up new rules to allow the sale of much less expensive hearing aids that can be tuned with a cell phone. The FDA hasn’t done that yet in spite of being prodded by…
