Meeting Report
IHearYou(R) – A Modern Tele-audiology System
Presented by Prof Peter Blamey
On Monday August 8th, 16 members and 4 guests assembled in the SAE Melbourne Lecture Theatre for the Annual General Meeting of the AES Melbourne Section, and to hear Peter Blamey present on his company’s IHearYou(R) Modern Tele-Audiology System
After the (mercifully short) AGM, Peter Blamey presented on the IHearYou® technology, its characteristics and benefits. This talk built on the foundation Peter had laid in his June 2016 presentation (see link below)
He started by examining how the hearing aid industry suffers from poor public acceptance, even amongst people who could enjoy real benefits from the technology, and covered the common excuses often heard, things like the bother of visiting an audiologist, hearing aids that don’t work well, and are expensive and hard to use. He outlined how he and his colleagues had worked to eliminate these objections by designing a system that works better, is significantly less expensive, and does not require an audiologist to set it up.
He explained that the current system adds significant costs in the audiologists testing and setup process, and the manufacturers’ margins – resulting in a device with a manufacturing cost in the hundreds of dollars eventually costing many thousands of dollars, and how his system can be set up and tweaked by the user, both empowering them and saving a considerable amount of money.
He went on to describe their Online Speech Perception Test (SPT) and how it can, within certain limits, predict the audiogram – providing a useful tool for self-evaluation and preliminary device setup.
He described the test, showed typical results, and demonstrated the correlation between the SPT and a traditional audiologist’s audiogram .
He went on to describe how the Blamey Saunders devices can be user programmed with a Bluetooth adaptor to connect to a phone or PC and make changes.
He then described their next generation hearing aids which are currently under development and will be manufactured in Melbourne.
He finished with a sobering graph which demonstrated the need to control healthcare costs, by predicting that the state’s healthcare costs would exceed the state’s total revenue income by the year 2043, so like all other healthcare areas the need to reduce hearing aid end costs is crucial.
The presentation ended with a lively Q&A session, with many attendees plying Peter with questions about a range of hearing and hearing aid questions.
A video has been assembled of the talk, covering the Powerpoint slides+audio:
This video can also be viewed directly on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RztX2FW2Z-Y
The slides only as a downloadable PDF can be accessed here.
-and-
The audio-only recording can be heard or downloaded here.
Other Links:
Peter’s June AES presentation – Meeting Report here.
The Blamey Saunders online Speech Perception test is here.
Thanks to Graham Haynes and his trusty Tascam for the audio recording, and
a special thanks to the SAE Institute for allowing us the use of their fine facilities.