Hearing loss: there's an app for that

The iPod Touch and the iPhone have an app for everything it seems. There’s apps for using Twitter, tracking stocks, playing games, creating new recipes and making sure you don’t burn them, learning French, the list goes on and on.

When is someone going to build a hearing aid app?

An app that turns an iPod into a fully-functioning hearing aid, it isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. The iPhone already has everything it needs: a microphone, two outputs and the ability to run software for sound processing. The iPod has all that except the microphone but I’m sure someone could build a cheap add-on. Are there wireless headphone for the iPod? That’d be even better.

This setup would make for a cheap assistive listening device. It would also be a poweful one as it could run the high-end software that is in today’s cutting edge hearing aids. I could imagine a day where all of the big-name manufacturers have their hearing-aid software available on the app store for download so you could pick and choose for a couple of dollars for each hearing aid.

All those people blasting their eardrums with their iPods could have the solution to their impending hearing loss without having to buy extra hardware!

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  3. Do hard of hearing audiologists have an advantage over those with normal hearing?
  4. Over 70% of youngsters show first signs of hearing loss
  5. Conductive hearing loss

6 comments
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  1. Ken Rose on January 12th 2010 at 8:11 am :

    How about an App that can translate Speech into Text in real time? Just shove your Smart Phone’s Mic into a Hearing person’s face and text appears on the screen?

    And have a noise filter so it could be used by Hearing people in noisy environments to text each other using their voices. So it’s appealing to both Hearing and Deaf???

  2. Steve on January 12th 2010 at 8:47 pm :

    Hi Ken,

    I like the idea. I did a quick search and turns out that the iPhone does already have some features to help the deaf and hard of hearing:

    http://www.apple.com/accessibility/iphone/hearing.html

    I’m not quite sure what they mean by, “You can use iPhone in TTY mode with standard teletype machines.”. I guess there’s no voice-to-text app for the iPhone at the moment so the next best option is to make it work with teletype machines.

    Your speech-to-text idea is definitely possible, there’s already software out there that does a good job of it.

  3. Speakuplibrarian on January 14th 2010 at 4:32 pm :

    Someone was showing me an iphone app recently that did a little bit of speech to text. I can’t recall the name of it. I liked the idea but it would need more work to be truly useful for the deaf and hard of hearing.

  4. Liz on February 8th 2010 at 5:30 pm :

    I don’t know much about what the iphone has to offer, but from what I’ve read. Sounds good.

  5. Si Hammond on May 5th 2010 at 10:21 pm :

    The latest hearing aids already have Bluetooth wireless to enable you to take phone calls and listen to music.

    Once a hearing aid can rely on a high-quality wireless connection then there’s no longer any reason to have that expensive processing hardware on board; It can be offloaded to the smartphone in your pocket.

    The hearing aid hardware is reduced to a high-spec Bluetooth headset that is relatively cheap. The processing is performed by software running on the more powerful processor that you already have in your pocket – that will probably be upgraded every couple of years in any case. Improvements can then be independently made by lots of small-time programmers and hardware designers rather than a few big companies.

    Exciting stuff!

  6. Richard on July 14th 2010 at 10:41 am :

    all we need now is a programmer with a big heart to opensource the app and a tech from the hearing field ie me to make a mould and insert the bluetooth hardware, and bobs your uncle

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