The hard part about disrupting the hearing aid industry is that most of what people are paying for is service. First there are a lot of reasons that people could have hearing loss where a hearing aid isn't the right choice, like a tumor. Then they need to figure out how to get the darned things in and configured the way they want. Then they need to figure out that they don't like it when they're on then phone, then you tweak the programming. Then they call because they can't figure out how to replace the battery, then they hate it because they can hear the fridge running again, then they finally go out and find out it doesn't work in noisy places, so you tweak it again, and so on. Plus hearing aid programming isn't prescriptive, like determining a vision prescription. People have different expectations and experiences of hearing as well as different audio environments in their lives. Automating testing or programming is a almost a wicked problem and then you'll get to face the American Association of Audiologist. I'd love to see it happen but I spent a year helping a company with deep pockets try and it's a lot less simple than it seems. Driving down manufacturing costs isn't enough to truly disrupt that industry.

I'm hard of hearing and I use bleeding edge hearing aids ( Change them every 2-4 years, got these little more than two years back - http://www.phonak.com/com/b2c/en/products/hearing_instrument...)

Hearing aids are limited in what they can do and will be limited in the near future. Hearing aids never restore full hearing let alone actually improve your hearing.

Hearing aids operate only on the outer ear and are basically just amplifiers with some smartness built in (trying to cut out background noise, amplify foreground etc). So they're really limited in what they can achieve.

The two greatest hopes for the hard of hearing are 1. Cochlear Implants 2. Flawless speech to text translation. You want to be working on either of those two.

I have heard from a guy with same hard-of-hearing problem and he was quite against implants ... his impression was that they are practically impossible to upgrade, and they replace whatever ability of hearing you might have left. Conversation has happened 3 years ago, so maybe things have changed for the better. (Another of his concerns was, that he felt pressured by his MD to get an implant)

You don't even have to be old to have this problem. I'm 31 and wear hearing aids due to tinitus -- $4000 for far less sophisticated tech than is in a phone from a decade ago. The medical devices industry is a total racket, but IMHO hearing aids are the worst of the worst.

A friend of similar age has worn hearing aids his whole life, but has shared a somewhat different experience. While current-gen hearing aids are very expensive (~$9k), they can pair with his phone and function as bluetooth headphones for all the reasons you'd normally wear headphones (no mic, though).

At least they could if his insurance covered the expense. Instead, he wears tech that's a few years outdated.

Not terribly cool now, but hearing aids are becoming cyborg tech. Better hearing than your peers with broad device interoperability - it might be enough to make folks with decent hearing to consider buying aids, like athletes and lasik / performance contact lenses. We're not far from slightly-outdated hearing aids being pretty cool.

And no, I'm not making light of his deafness - I'm just echoing his own excitement.

That has got to be some devilish tinnitus.

Ditto insulin pump. A friend's insurance plan just changed coverage and the unit friend uses is no longer "in plan". New unit costs $7000. Kicker, for me, is the consumable nature. There's a transmitter with a non-serviceable battery. When it dies, you're just supposed to get a new one. $1400.

Another friend just bought a hearing aid. The (other) comment about product + service is absolutely true. This friend marvels at the sophisticated DSP stuff going on. This friend is also grumpy that the internals are proprietary, so there's no way hack it, or even do adjustments. It's probably better for most people to have the expert do it, hearing is complicated stuff, but the principle stands.

With the costs of R&D, manufacturing, sales/service/support, and especially regulation/approval, it's not clear to me how the markets for low volume products are going to be disrupted.

I have a friend who has been tinkering with a disruptive product for this market (backburnered whilst he works on other stuff). I'll point him to this subthread - thanks.