Today, Kathleen Raven works as a health journalist and wears “invisible” inside-the-ear hearing aids. As she told the NPR reporter, each time she received a new pair, every few years, advancements in the technology allowed her to hear more sounds than she could with the previous older hearing aids. Her current in-ear devices (the report doesn’t indicate what brand or model, but notes that they cost US$7,000) allow her to hear notes in Beethoven’s music that she had never heard before. I found Raven’s story noteworthy, because it demonstrates how advances in technology are moving at an ever-accelerating rate. Improvements in hearing devices’ capabilities are made possible in large part by the trends of miniaturization of computer chips, and exponential growth in computing power, at lower cost. What’s ahead, therefore, will be astounding in terms of what hearing aids can do. (Perhaps the late author Douglas Adams‘ Babel fish universal in-ear translator wasn’t impossible fantasy!) Most people intuitively think that improvements in technology advance on a linear path (i.e., a straight line that continues to rise at the same rate, year after year). With computing and information technology, it’s very different. Ray Kurzweil, a brilliant inventor and futurist who now is heading up artificial intelligence for Google, first explained in 2001 that computing and information technology is on an exponential growth curve. Back then he said: “We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).” If you want to see Kurzweil explain this expertly in under 3 minutes, watch the video of him speaking in 2005 below. (Otherwise, skip over it and my article continues below.)
To get back to the incredible gains in capability and shrinking of size for hearing aids in the 33 years that Raven has been using generation after generation of the devices, if you think about the exponential growth of capability in the coming few years, it will be an amazing time to be alive and have ears — whether they work perfectly or not (slightly or severely). In 2014, it’s pretty amazing that nearly invisible hearing aids are available that can stream music from your phone directly to your ears, or direct a caller’s voice on a phone call wirelessly to your ears, or automatically tune out much background noise in order for the user to hear the person speaking to them in a noisy environment. But if Kurzweil is right about the continued exponential growth of computing and information technology, then those are just teasers for what will be possible soon. (I covered another angle to the future of hearing-aid technology in this older Open Ears blog post.) This gives me the opportunity to fantasize about what could be ahead for hearing devices. Some of these ideas may be too far-fetched to become reality. But others might be possible in a few short years when a chip the size of a grapefruit seed has as much computational power as a 2014 high-end laptop computer. I view this as an opportunity to spark the imagination of hearing-aid designers who are working on future models. And I encourage you to add your hearing-aid wish list items to the comments section of this article. Perhaps we’ll influence development of future hearing-aid features. OK, fantasy-futurist mode is ON…
Those are enough ideas from me. It’s your turn: what would you like to see from hearing aids of the future? Remember, we’re talking about a not-too-distant future where tremendous computing power can be harnessed in a tiny silicon chip. Don’t limit your imagination to what you think is possible to achieve. Exponential acceleration in the power of technology makes what was fantasy now possible in the coming years.