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Ear Hygiene and Critical Listening

Personalized Ear Detailing

If we have a vehicle we value, at one point we probably had it “detailed,” maybe before we have the car sent over to the shop for service. I have found car mechanics are more meticulous on the vehicles that arrive in immaculate condition. The same thinking applies to golden ears, from product development teams getting the product’s tonal balance DNA sonic signature, as well as chasing down buzzes and resonances. Cleaning out your ears is a sensible procedure before critical listening.

Personalization in headphones and TWS earphones is common these days, and with over-the-counter (OTC) devices reaching the market, the need to profile your hearing is now a requirement for self-fitting any ear assistance to your ear’s idiosyncrasies. Very soon those personal hearing profiles will become commonplace in new-generation earbuds. Apple is leading that trend by introducing accessibility features to compensate for any potential hearing loss in their consumer-level products.

Based in Belgium, with a Development Center in Spain and offices in the US, Jacoti Hearing Technologies develops hearing enhancement solutions embeddable in consumer devices, for people with mild hearing losses. The Jacoti Hearing Center app for iOS, which integrates with Apple AirPods and AirPods Pro, allows users to conduct precise at-home hearing tests with wireless Apple earbuds.

Examples include Apple’s AirPods Pro2, which can generate a thorough self-assessment tailored to the user’s sound profile and will soon add a scientifically validated Hearing Test, and have a clinical-grade, over-the-counter Hearing Aid capability for users with mild-to-moderate hearing loss.

Bose also explored that approach before deciding to leave the OTC approach to Lexie, and there are several products available in the market leveraging Alango’s suite of Hearing Enhancement and Assistive Listening processing solutions.

Alango pioneered this consumerization of Hearing Enhancement and developed a licensable software reference design called Hearing Enhancement Package (HEP). The HEP solution allows Hearing Enhancement and Assistive Listening functionalities to be included in low-cost consumer-grade devices. The Assistive Listening solutions offers the possibility to pair listening devices with a Bluetooth transmitter (e.g., to transmit TV audio to avoid excessively raising the TV volume), to pair a Bluetooth microphone (e.g., for a conference or presentation), or using two paired HEP-enabled devices to be used as Bluetooth intercoms.