Days in a Blue Suit - EUHA 2023

The halls 3 and 4 of Nürnberger Messe are well booked, better than in the last years - but they are not completely, 100% booked; here and there the black concrete floor visibly stretches beyond the carpet. - Is this the space for a stand of some lost exhibitor, or rather a space waiting for some company that is yet to be founded?

• Relocation of the hearing aid industry from the protected niche of medical devices into consumer space appears completed. Major companies now manage colorful collections of brands that seamlessly extend into the open fields of OTC world. A stand with cochlear implants and another one with TWS headsets now share a same carpet (and management).?
• A few weeks ago GN announced unification of their audio research & development across the whole product spectrum. In the future their gaming headsets and hearing aids will originate from the same lab and very probably share a significant part of the technology.?
• I see this development of the industry as another historical cycle: after the vertical and horizontal consolidation (the so-called big-N system remained within the medical realm) at the beginning of our century, this decade's answer to growth imperative is in the crossover of big-N to consumer electronics. This being said, who can guarantee that the success-story of the consolidation is definitely off the table??
• In any case, the OTC threat, the fear that some oversized player from outside will enter the market and disrupt the ruling ecosystem, has not materialized.?To paraphrase the famous line from Il Gattopardo that suggests that everything has to change - for things to remain same: If someone has to disrupt our industry - then let us do that ourselves!
• With similar confidence the HA incumbents observe the threat through Chinese competition. In light of growing Western mistrust against globalization, mediocre Chinese devices shown in Nuremberg seemed to suggest to European manufacturers that they are coming in peace and by no means want to appear as a serious competition. ?
• Claims of ‘End of history’ tend to be premature. Even in the hearing aid industry. At least from the technology point of view, the hearing aid product resembles a slow, but busy construction site:
• The stand of Auracast? is dedicated to the introduction of a Bluetooth-based standard for broadcasting. An important step, considering limitations of traditional inductive loops. The draft of this feature was published by SIG (Bluetooth Special Interest Group) exactly ten years ago and I wonder what caused such a long delay between the idea and the product reality.?
• Starkey presented its version of AI-based speech enhancement, running on a novel hardware that is confidently declared “the biggest leap forward ever in hearing aid technology”. AI-based denoising is indeed one of the rare signal processing features that can spark real progress in the hearing aid product. Predominant hearing difficulties related with speech-in-noise can not be fully resolved by amplification - this denoising promises instead to first transform the acoustical environment into much friendlier speech-in-quiet.??
• AI-based denoising has made huge steps in the last five years and has been optimised for acceptable latencies. The other critical parameter? - computational load - is now tackled by dedicated hardware and by somewhat loosened constraints for battery life. Hearing aids with zinc-air batteries were expected to run at least one week with one pill. Current rechargeable devices must only deliver one full day of continuous operation.
• The scalability of the new Starkey semiconductor was praised to me. From now on, the scarcity of computational power that followed me through my career will become obsolete. Only after I left the Starkey stand did I realize that I didn’t ask about their particular plans for utilizing this new abundance of computational resources. Technology excellence is an important part of a product, but never the only part.
• H?rzentrum Oldenburg showed interesting findings about loudness scaling and the implications of such effects on hearing aid fitting. For example, some hearing losses can counterintuitively be served by negative amplification. I was even shown a fitting record of a device with zero-gain that was actually sold to a satisfied customer. Together with the phenomenon of hidden hearing loss these findings question the dominant practice of threshold based fitting. This might in the future play a role in designing OTC hearing aids.

• It is understandable that OTC devices share many concepts with traditional hearing aids - after all, many of them are based on the same technology, or even on completely identical physical products. Less understandable is the fact that this equivalency includes concepts of fitting (individualization of amplification parameters). The standard paradigm where compensation of hearing difficulty can be managed by vertical (volume) sliders is 1:1 transferred in the OTC realm. Common ground is always the hearing threshold - starting from this soil, the hearing-aid world becomes a forest of sliders.
• Fitting software made the transition from Windows desktops of healthcare practitioners to the smartphones of individual consumers without changing its basic user interface (sliders!) - professional fitting turned into self-fitting without actually introducing new use case.?

At the EUHA 2023 the industry radiated a calm, confident picture. The music was soft, popcorn was served in small, low calorie portions. Looks good. A less informed visitor might even ask herself: Is?there any room left for the next “biggest leap forward ever in hearing aid technology”?