Conjuring Images of a Bionic Future

IPhone-connected hearing aids are just the beginning.

Dick Loizeaux recently found himself meandering through a noisy New York nightclub. This was unusual; Mr. Loizeaux, a 65-year-old former pastor, began suffering hearing loss nearly a decade ago, and nightclubs are not really his scene. “They’re the absolute worst place to hear anybody talk,” he said.

But this time was different. Mr. Loizeaux had gone to the club to test out the GN ReSound Linx, one of two new models of advanced hearing aids that can be adjusted precisely through software built into Apple’s iPhone. When he entered the club, Mr. Loizeaux tapped on his phone to switch his hearing aids into “restaurant mode.” The setting amplified the sound coming from the hearing aids’ forward-facing microphones, reducing background noise. To play down the music, he turned down the hearing aids’ bass level and bumped up the treble. Then, as he began chatting with a person standing to his left, Mr. Loizeaux tapped his phone to favor the microphone in his left hearing aid, and to turn down the one in his right ear.

The results were striking. “After a few adjustments, I was having a comfortable conversation in a nightclub,” Mr. Loizeaux told me during a recent phone interview — a phone call he would have had difficulty making with his older hearing aids. “My wife was standing next to me in the club and she was having trouble having the same conversation, and she has perfect hearing.”

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the latest crop of advanced hearing aids are better than the ears most of us were born with. The devices can stream phone calls and music directly to your ears from your phone. They can tailor their acoustic systems to your location; when the phone detects that you have entered your favorite sports bar, it adjusts the hearing aids to that environment.

The hearing aids even let you transform your phone into an extra set of ears. If you’re chatting with your co-worker across a long table, set the phone in front of her, and her words will stream directly to your ears.

When I recently tried out the Linx and the Halo, another set of iPhone-connected hearing aids made by the American hearing aid company Starkey, I was floored. Wearing these hearing aids was like giving my ears a software upgrade. For the first time, I had fine-grain control over my acoustic environment, the sort of bionic capability I never realized I had craved. I’m 35 and I have normal hearing. But if I could, I’d wear these hearing aids all the time.

IPhone-connected hearing aids are just the beginning.

Today most people who wear hearing aids, eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs and other accessibility devices do so to correct a disability. But new hearing aids point to the bionic future of disability devices.

As they merge with software baked into our mobile computers, devices that were once used simply to fix whatever ailed us will begin to do much more. In time, accessibility devices may even let us surpass natural human abilities. One day all of us, not just those who need to correct some physical deficit, may pick up a bionic accessory or two.

“There is a way in which this technology will give people with hearing loss the ability to outperform their normal-hearing counterparts,” said Dave Fabry, Starkey’s vice president for audiology and professional relations.

Read more . . .