The short-lived furniture-as-hearing-aid category and product ride-alongs

King?John VI of Portugal and Brazil loved sacred music but was terrified of thunder, so his hearing loss in later life was a mixed blessing. On the debit side, he struggled to hear the flattery of his courtiers. He sought out Frederick Rein. ?

Rein was born in Leipzig around 1812 and moved to London to work as an instrument maker. He experimented with form and function, and made ear trumpets, breast pumps and a “continual stream enema reservoir”. They shared some characteristics but were not functionally interchangeable without a good wash.

It’s not clear if the 'acoustic chair' was Rein’s idea or King John’s instruction, but Rein built a throne and carved the gaping mouths of lions into the front of the arms. The arms were hollow, and they fed a tube that emerged from the back of the throne and went in John's ear. The throne was an ear trumpet you could sit on.

Its design came through customer research. People talked to the King while he was sitting in his chair. They typically kneeled before him. The King was self-conscious about his hearing loss. The functionality rode along discretely on an existing form.

The chair funneled sound but did not amplify it, and was cumbersome and not very portable, so the furniture-as-hearing-aid category was short-lived.?

Miller Reese Hutchison produced the first electric hearing aid, the Akouphone,?in 1898, reusing telephone parts. The hearing aid and sound technology evolved together, from tubes, to transistors, to integrated circuits. Miniaturization took hearing aids from tabletop, to purse, to over the shoulder, then directly to the ear.

Bell Labs developed digital processing for speech and audio signals on a mainframe in the early 1960s, but the equipment was too bulky, expensive and slow to help hearing. In 1985, the first full digital hearing aid took sounds in through a microphone, processed them, and played them back through miniature loudspeakers in the ear. It could be calibrated to suit the listener — a sound studio and producer in your ear.

Hearing aids today can soften crowd noise and turn up your partner’s voice in a restaurant. They can switch on your preferred settings when you walk into somewhere familiar. You can pair a hearing aid with an external microphone (here the boundaries with bugging start to dissolve) or streaming service. During the pandemic, Face Mask Mode boosted frequencies that masks typically dampen. All useful evolutions of the core functionality.

Around 2018, when the consumer electronics industry was all over wearables, hearing aid manufacturers realized they had one. What else could it do? Hearing aids can now track steps and detect falls. 31.1% of adults over 65 experience hearing loss. One in four adults 65 and older falls in any given year. The hearing aid was in position already, in the right place, being used by the right people for fall detection to ride along.

The fall-detecting hearing aid is the new acoustic throne. The hearing aid attached itself to the throne. Now fall detection has attached itself to the hearing aid.

King John’s throne and a modern hearing aid have value on their own, but a thoughtful ride-along can offer the customer more. It’s a distribution strategy, like putting your app in the App Store or Google Play Store, but highly targeted and symbiotic. Ride-along can be a very efficient way to find product or feature scale.

Of course, not everyone needs fall detection. King John's acoustic chair had a well-stuffed seat covered in exquisite gold brocade. Why bother getting up?

#audio #medicaldevices #hearingaids #ai #productmarketing #productmanagement #wearables #elderlycare