November 7, 2018 – Bose Hearing Aid

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Anchor lead: Will a new hearing aid encourage more people to use the devices? Elizabeth Tracey reports

The audio manufacturer Bose has recently received FDA approval to market a hearing aid. Nicolas Reed, an audiologist and researcher at Johns Hopkins, heralds this as good news for consumers and other prospective manufacturers of hearing aids.

Reed: They have this novel device that’s self-fitted, and they collected data, laboratory data, and real world data, saying that it worked for people. They liked it, they liked it as much as any typical device, that it helped them, that they were able to self-fit accurately. Really really unique in the hearing aid world for them to provide all this data behind it. So this is a unique pathway that they’ve opened up. The pathway for purchase could be online, it could be through a dispensed audiologist if they want to go that way, the actual pathway to purchase hasn’t changed much.  :30

Reed notes that many people find the purchase of hearing aids cost-prohibitive, and predicts that products such as the one from Bose may help shift that. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.