Over the counter hearing aids

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The first over the counter hearing aids go on sale in the US today.

See this for an NZ focus:

and this for product costs (basically drops the cost of hearing aids to 5%-20% of current costs):

The Ars Technica article has some interesting background on the lobbying efforts from the industry to stop this occurring (presumably there have been similar efforts here as well). Does anyone know of movement in our regulatory framework?

Getting vastly cheaper hearing aids would be a significant boon to many elderly in Aotearoa.

As a side-note, Iā€™m expecting mobile phone vendors to make some serious innovations in this space. With the screen, microphone array, connectivity, battery CPU and machine learning capabilities of (say) an iPhone, you could make some amazing improvements.

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This is massive in terms of cost - also I bought new airpods the other day - and they basically come with this functionality. I was ready for it to be a mediocre experience but it has surprised me on the up side.

Jon

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