Following my story published earlier today featuring Soundly CEO Blake Cadwell, I have more to share on the confluence of hearing health and artificial intelligence. This time, the news comes from Starkey.
Last year, the venerable hearing aid manufacturer announced an expansion of its product line with a new model it calls Genesis AI. Starkey boasts on its website the device represents the “biggest leap forward ever in hearing technology” that makes them “anything but ordinary.” The company says what makes Genesis AI so advanced is the way it mimics the cerebral cortex by processing sound the way our brains do, noting the tech is capable of making 80 million adjustments per hour. According to Starkey, Genesis AI has a comfortable, ergonomic design, all-day battery life, and are durable in terms of waterproofing and dirt resistance. Users control and manage their Genesis AI device through the My Starkey companion app, available on iOS and Android.
These assuredly aren’t your grandmother’s hearing aids.
In a recent interview conducted with me via email, Starkey’s chief hearing officer in Dave Fabry, a licensed audiologist who described his role as “[focusing] on the link between hearing loss and other health issues such as dementia, depression, and overall well-being,” explained Starkey uses both machine learning and deep neural networks to improve performance of its hearing aids in “unprecedented fashion.” He said the company is using AI to better sound quality and speech intelligibility—both being table stakes when in crowded, noisy environments. Moreover, Fabry said AI expands upon the possibilities in terms of future innovations around hearing health and overall wellness. This tech not only improves acoustic performance, but also enhances smart assistant capabilities by way of natural language processing.
“We’re implementing technology that most thought was impossible for hearing aids, including real-time language translation and transcription, voice-activated commands, fall detection and alerts, and other health-related features, and putting them into cosmetically appealing devices that fit the patient’s ear,” Fabry said of Starkey’s quest for healthier hearing. “The possibilities are endless, and I’m as excited today for the future of hearing aid technology as I have ever been in my career.”
Fabry’s distinguished career, which spans four decades, has included a current seat on the board of the American Auditory Society, as well as stints as president and board member of Academy of Audiology and in journalism. He served as editor-in-chief of trade publications in Audiology Today and the American Journal of Audiology.
In telling Genesis AI’s origin story, Fabry echoed sentiments I’ve heard made by others in the hearing health space by saying hearing aids have undergone a rapid evolution from what he called “dedicated, single-purpose devices” to becoming evermore computer-like devices that are multipurpose and multifunction. More specifically, Fabry said Genesis AI’s roots trace back to 2018 and Starkey’s Livio AI device. It was a product that, according to Fabry, “provided better hearing, monitored physical activity and social engagement, automatically detected falls, and served as an intelligent virtual assistant, in addition to improving speech intelligibility in quiet and noisy listening environments.” Shortly after launch, Fabry said Starkey president and CEO Brandon Sawalich signed off on a new project which would “[build] upon our earlier success but required significant investments in hardware, software and computational power that were not currently available in hearing aids.”
That project, and its technologies, laid the foundation for Genesis AI.
In an interview concurrent to Fabry’s, Sawalich reiterated his vision for what Genesis AI would be came in 2018, adding that Starkey was the first company to incorporate AI into hearing aids. Sawalich, himself a 30-year Starkey veteran who has worked in “virtually every corner of the business learning every aspect of the hearing healthcare industry,” told me “innovation never sleeps” at Starkey and that Genesis AI “delivers unprecedented sound quality once thought unimaginable in a hearing aid.” A primary focus of the company’s work, he said, is fighting the stigma associated with wearing hearing aids. He shared a statistic in which a person on average waits 4 to 6 years upon learning about their hearing loss to take steps in fixing it, saying the reason for such procrastination is the worry that hearing aids will make the person “look old.” Sawalich seconded Fabry’s sentiments about hearing aids ever-burgeoning abilities, telling me modern technology has transformed them from being boring and sterile to sleek, stylish, and functional.
“The hearing aid now delivers superpower hearing and is a tool for active aging,” Sawalich said of the modern-day hearing aid.
For his part, Fabry noted the hearing aid’s main objective—which remains in place for the most part—was to augment sound, but caveated augmentation is only half on the equation. The other piece, he said, is a person’s listening intent—something he acknowledged “even the most sophisticated algorithms can’t accurately reflect.” He said most people try to isolate sound from ambient noise, like focusing on a person’s voice during conversation at a noisy restaurant. To that end, Genesis AI has a feature Starkey calls Edge Mode, which Fabry characterized as “continuously [adapting] based on the hearing aid user’s intention to optimize comfort or clarity in challenging listening environments way beyond what traditional machine-learning AI can provide alone.” Edge Mode, he added, requires a considerable amount of computational horsepower, alluding to the aforementioned 80 million adjustments per hour Starkey touts in its marketing copy. That processing work amounts to “more than a billion adjustments” per day, according to Fabry.
“AI is opening the doors to technology we never thought was possible in a device like a hearing aid,” he said. “It’s incredible to see this evolution of wearable technology have real impacts on people’s everyday lives.”
When asked about feedback on Genesis AI, Sawalich said the product is the company’s “best-selling hearing aid” in Starkey’s 60-year history and has entrenched itself as the industry’s “flagship product.” He added hearing is an essential part of the human experience, telling me it connects us to the world around us. “I’ve heard people describe the sound Genesis AI delivers as going from black and white to color,” he said. “This level of transparent sound quality was once thought impossible with hearing aids. Our team made it possible.”
Sawalich went on to say people expect more from their devices than ever before, hearing aids included. They want to wear something that’s discreet, sleek, and stylish—all the while being competent in augmenting their aural abilities. Starkey, he said, conducted “extensive field research” to better understand what patients need and want from a contemporary hearing aid. Augmentation is a given, but isn’t everything.
“People want more than that. They want these devices to give them an edge in life,” Sawalich said of customers’ expectations. “This is how Starkey is transforming the image of what a hearing aid is. Yes, it can help you hear better—but it can also help you live better. This technology is giving people tools for active living, and that is changing the narrative and eliminating the dangerous stigma around these devices.”
Fabry concurred, saying today’s hearing aids must do a lot of “heavy lifting” in terms of compute power, but also be strong and flexible enough to be considerably more than the proverbial one-trick pony.
Looking towards the future, both Fabry and Sawalich expressed the usual boilerplate sentiments about Starkey forging further ahead and keeping up with innovation.. Fabry said while doctors have long known of the correlation between untreated hearing loss and cognitive decline, a recent Aging and Cognitive Health Evaluation in Elders study revealed “aging individuals with elevated risk of cardiovascular disease who wore hearing aids preserved 48% greater cognitive function over a three-year period than a control group who did not use amplification.” The findings are notable, he added, because it’s “the first large-scale randomized controlled study that provided empirical evidence for the importance of early intervention.” As an older Baby Boomer himself, the study is resonant with Fabry; if an older person has hypertension and/or diabetes, he suggests they get their hearing checked by an audiologist.
“If you have a [hearing] loss, try hearing aids,” Fabry said. “The ear holds an incredible amount of promise for giving us insights into our health, and AI is helping us unlock that power.”
For Sawalich, Genesis AI fulfills said promise.
“Genesis AI was just the beginning,” he said of Starkey’s prospects for the future. “Five years from now, Starkey will be ten years ahead of the industry. This innovation is impacting people’s lives in unbelievable ways. It’s also combatting the stigma associated with hearing loss. Stigma remains the biggest barrier to adoption, but technology will finally break that barrier to make people want to have the hearing edge and be the best they can be each and every day.”