An acquaintance of mine recently got a hearing aid and complained about the loudness. Let's face it: many of us, if we did not take care of our ears well enough, may need hearing aids at some point in our lives. So, why not seize the opportunity to make a fun and useful gadget?
In my opinion, the ideal sound tech hearing aid would come with the following features:
1. A decent mic, maybe e. g. a DPA omni capsule or similar.
2. A pad button (e. g. for rock concerts; optional)
3. A gain button
4. A noise gate (to sort of mimic the cocktail party effect; or an EQ preset for better voice recognition, maybe enhanced by AI if the noise is of the same frequency spectrum as the voice(s), plus giving the voice(s) a +6 dB-ish boost. The AI feature could be an optional add-on, like in a lego toolkit)
5. A compressor (e. g. if you are listening to a conversation where a speaker always goes quiet at the end of their phrases) with automatic makeup gain
6. A mute button for when you want to be left in peace
7. An EQ with at least 6 frequencies - for example, give the higher frequencies a mild boost if you lose them as you get older. Also, some people have individual "valleys" in certain regions. You could establish an individual preset in collaboration with a doctor and/or hearing aid tech based on the results of your hearing test, with different settings for each ear. Usually, you would want to go for a clean dB(A) curve (or maybe less bass for when you are not working / listening to music) - taking the Fletcher Munson curves into account (iirc, they mostly look similar at different sound levels, but maybe the best response would require a real-time analyser, and somewhat shifting EQ curves based on the current avg dB level? On second thoughts, this would likely feel weird, as I would prefer one fixed setting - probably best to settle on a compromise).
8. various FX (optional, for fun)
9. A signal splitter for sampling interesting noise where the 2nd pathway goes to an external data storage device (for example: smartphone memory card) and saves the signal in a lossless format (pre or post eq, fx; I would prefer .wav). The data can then easily be extracted into your OS / DAW of choice (Maybe, to prevent abuse of this feature or spying, the hearing aid should feature a red blinking LED, like an earring, whenever it is recording)
It could e. g. be controlled by a smartphone app that is linked to the device via bluetooth and a password.
I would totally buy it, if I ever needed it, and I know that many fellow nerds out there probably would, too. Start building one for us, will you?
