And what if you only have dentures?

From their website they’re claiming a frequency range of 250 – 12,000 Hz which sounds fishy to me. Most bone conductors top out at around 6,000, including Bone Anchored and Bodyworn devices with more powerful power sources. Getting a BC transducer to vibrate at 12KHz is no mean feat, you can pretty much bet there will be almost zero gain to play with, i.e. the functioning ear will need to be perfect for this to work.

Also the BTE looks quite a beast to me. I currently fit wireless CROS/BICROS hearing aids far smaller than that looks to be. Ok you do need to wear two but the cost/benefit analysis here seems like it’s likely to be seriously askew.

I dunno if these do, but some behind the ear ones have bluetooth. I’ve got the $1600 (each) models that don’t have it, but my brother has ones (more like $2k each) that do. He can put a little bluetooth mic up on a table during a meeting, and even stream audio from his MP3 player.

I’d dearly love to have mine integrate with my iPhone. Like have little voices whisper in my ear when I get new email, messages, tell me the name or number of incoming calls, meeting reminders, etc.

How are you going to talk and eat with this? You’re still wearing a BTE so cosmesis is not improved. Is the perception of vibration at low frequency not going to be really annoying?

Totally untrue about the inability to upgrade implantable devices by the by. For Cochlear Implant 90% of the heavy lifting is done by the speech processor which can be upgraded. For Bone Anchored hearing aids it’s literally a clip off and replace job, done in seconds.

This will get really impressive only if they implant it in the jaw as a molar replacement with piezoelectric charging through the device itself & a mic implanted in the ear canal.

“Among Gernsback’s other inventions (he held 80 patents by the time he died) were the Hypnobioscope, for “sleep-learning,” and the Osophone, an early bone conductor hearing aid. “

a) This is a fantastic device for spooks of all kinds, who normally give themselves away by putting their finger on their earpiece to hear another agent talking to them on the radio. You’d never be able to tell if they were using one of these.

b) It would be great for secretly listening to, for example, Test Match Special at work, if your boss had banned radios.

c) Why not pair it with your mobile phone? If equipped with a microphone as well, you could dispense with the bluetooth headset.

d) What happens when you swallow it? Which you definitely (deafinitely?) will at some stage. Would you really want to find it afterwards?

(e

This is what impresses me about the what I’ll call the Blue Tooth. With a proper mold by a dentist the Blue Tooth could fit extremely tightly, and the mold could be made of a hard material to transmit sound well.

But really this thing needs to be shrunk a bit more and implanted invisibly in some hole in the head.