Hearing Informed

Scientists from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT have developed a flexible battery made of carbon nanotubes and plain old paper. This battery holds a fair amount of power: 110Mah/g and is capable of powering a small fan.

A flexible battery like this could bode well for future hearing aid designs. I’ve found that the battery compartment on my hearing aid is one of the weakest links - the most likely to break and a size constraint. These batteries wouldn’t require as much material sandwiched around them.

While the narcissistic fixation on making hearing aids invisible seems overdone sometimes, I would still love to see the BTE hearing aids I wear get a little smaller while still being powerful enough to allow open air fixings (essentially a hearing aid with no mold in my ear) for my type of hearing loss. A flexible battery could potentially allow an “open-air” and flexible design such as this one- the wire ear:

The wire ear design has a lot of potential. The new form enhances usability and addresses a number of technical problems. The microphone is located in front of the ear, maximizing the opportunity of sound capture. The speaker is placed within the ear canal to reduce acoustic error resulting in improved sound quality and effectively decreasing the ‘echo’ sensation experienced when the close proximity of the speaker to the eardrum gives the sound a natural boost in volume. Another benefit of the distance between these elements is the reduction in auditory feedback. A flexible battery would fit well with this flexible design.

The ‘echo’ effect mentioned, which feels like your talking inside of a barrel, has been one of my biggest complaints with hearing aids. I tell the designers that I want to hear all the “natural sound” I can get with the combined artificially improved sound from my hearing aids. Ideally I would have both. Up until recently, it was largely impossible to get rid of this effect because a mold was needed to cover the entire ear canal opening to prevent unwanted feedback. Now, with faster processing power, this feedback can be overcome and “open” fittings are possible. This gets rid of the dreaded, talking inside of a barrel feeling. In nerd speak this effect is called occlusion.

Note: this design is not commercially viable yet. We can keep dreaming for now

Another design concept that could utilize a flexible battery are hearing aid glasses. Developed and available in the Netherlands, these glasses sport an array of microphones embedded across the both arms of the frame. This design could satisfy a lot of people who have both vision and hearing impairments. Improve your hearing with glasses: