Hearing Matters Podcast

Starkey Edge AI

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Discover the transformative power of Starkey Edge AI hearing aids, as audiology veteran Dr. Douglas L. Beck joins us to share his revolutionary experience with this cutting-edge technology. With over four decades in the field, Dr. Beck's firsthand account of how these hearing aids leverage deep neural networks to enhance sound clarity, especially in noisy environments, offers a unique insight into the future of auditory technology. From bustling football stadiums to intimate dinners, Dr. Beck's journey reveals the profound impact of sound clarity over mere loudness, highlighting the advanced signal-to-noise processing capabilities of Starkey Edge AI.

Join us as Dr. Beck uncovers how his experiences with these innovative hearing aids have reshaped his auditory world, offering seamless Bluetooth connectivity and exceptional noise reduction. Fitted by Bill Austin, Dr. Beck explores the intricacies of his unique hearing profile and the importance of precise fitting. This episode is packed with Dr. Beck's compelling insights into how Starkey Edge AI is setting a new standard in the auditory experience, making it a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of hearing technology.

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Blaise Delfino, M.S. - HIS :

Thank you. You to our partners. Cycle, built for the entire hearing care practice. Redux, the best dryer, hands down Caption call by Sorenson. Life is calling CareCredit. Here today to help more people hear tomorrow. Faderplugs the world's first custom adjustable earplug. Welcome back to another episode of the Hearing Matters Podcast. I'm founder and host, Blaise Delfino, and, as a friendly reminder, this podcast is separate from my work at Starkey. You're tuned in to the Hearing Matters Podcast. I'm your host, Blaise Delfino, and joining me on this Hearing Matters Brief is our very own co-host, Dr Douglas L Beck. Doug, welcome to the Hearing Matters Podcast.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Thank you, Blaise. I feel like this is a deja vu, like I've been here before, but I am honored to be here again.

Blaise Delfino, M.S. - HIS :

Doug, this episode is going to be a little bit different from our previous episodes because this is a brief and you were recently in Minneapolis, Minnesota, attending Starkey Day, where we introduced the Starkey Edge AI.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Thank you, Blaise. Yeah, I did attend and I was very impressed. I learned things that I was unfamiliar with and I got to experience new technology that really impressed me.

Blaise Delfino, M.S. - HIS :

Doug, this is a conversation I was really looking forward to. It's been a few months since you and I actually hopped on and recorded an episode together. This past week, we were both in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and we attended Starkey Day and Starkey introduced Starkey Edge AI and you had quite the experience. I believe you got fit with your hearing aids. Doug, bring us through your experience. You are pretty stoked to be talking about this. I know you were telling us on the phone.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

I've been an audiologist 40 years and I've worn dozens of hearing aids, and this one really kind of stoked my interest because we're talking about some of my favorite hearing aid features, like deep neural networks. I've been a believer in that for six or seven years. I know some people think, oh, that's new, oh, we did. No, it's been out there six or seven years. But the early forms of deep neural network were trained on millions of speech sounds, which is brilliant. But then you know, if a sound in the environment was beyond that training, it couldn't necessarily process that as well as something it had been trained on. So I went up to Storkey and was fitted with my very dear old friend Bill Austin. He did my fitting along with Dr Kent, and I knew immediately something was different. I'm walking around saying hi to people and I'm pressing buttons on my phone because it's a new app. I wasn't familiar with it and I was learning to use it and all of a sudden I noticed how much more clear sound was. Now let me say this After 40 years as an audiologist, I would tell you that there are many people who need sound louder, but the vast majority of people with hearing and listening problems need sound clearer and this is important. So it's not just making it louder, it's separating the speech from the noise. It's called the signal to noise ratio. We want to get the speech substantially louder than the background noise. So I put these things on and I'm walking around the building and I'm noticing a different perception of my own. My hearing loss is a little bit different for most people. Even though I have a mild to moderate sensory neural loss, I have an asymmetry which means that the one ear is different than the other ear and so it's a little bit difficult to fit. But it's not horrible to fit. I mean, any trained hearing care professional can do that in a matter of minutes. But if you don't put in the work it's not going to work out. So my primary issue is not loudness, it's clarity, and when I got these the world was much clearer. I found that to be true at a football stadium, at dinner with friends and colleagues and when I was on the plane on the way home. The Bluetooth was spectacular. You know I was able to watch a movie on my phone and really hear quite clearly. You know the noise reduction spectacular. You know, I was able to watch a movie on my phone and really hear quite clearly. You know the noise reduction was very good, but the more important thing to me was the overall processing. You know I had read about the deep neural network being about 100 times faster. I read about the fact that the hearing aid is waterproof down to about one meter. It has Bluetooth, of course, but the single most important factor for me is if you put all that together, that's great, but I need long streaming and in other words, I stream almost all day long. This new product, the Starkey Edge AI, has a battery life that's 51 hours.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

So I went up there to Minneapolis and I was fitted by Bill Austin, probably the world's most experienced hearing aid dispenser, and my ear molds are perfect and everything went great. And then, as I'm walking around the building, I'm starting to realize how much clearer speech sounds are for me. People would call me from across the way to say hey, doug, how are you doing? And I could maintain directional sound. I had localization ability and everything was clear. But it really came into focus for me that evening because we had a big event at the Vikings football stadium. So we're all there. It's obviously a terrible acoustic environment, although a beautiful stadium and we had dinner there, and I'm having dinner with some of my friends and colleagues and I could understand every word, which rarely happens at this stage in my life. So it was a marked difference between the other hearing aids that make things louder and this one, which is processing sound, allowing me to hear more clearly.

Blaise Delfino, M.S. - HIS :

Since I've really known you for many years now, you've always told me that you really do struggle in complex listening situations, and that is the majority of individuals who present with untreated hearing loss. And while you have a mild hearing loss, you still struggle in those noisy situations. And what was really interesting was when we were having dinner at the Viking Stadium. It was you, andrew Bellavia, sherry Eberts and Gail Hannon. I'm, of course, observing how you're doing with your technology. It might be a hearing care professional thing. You were so engaged. I saw you using your app to find the best setting, which was, for lack of a better term, so cool to see, because prior to wearing the Starkey Edge AI, you were wearing Starkey Genesis IIC. They're not Bluetooth compatible with your phone. Now you are in the driver's seat. What is that experience like?

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

It was familiar because I've had other high-tech hearing aids that you can run on an app, and so I've done that before, but I was never able to find a significant difference between the normal, the noise you know in other settings, so that's a great call-out. When I was getting programmed, initially Dr Ken Collins had programmed in two really good programs and they were great, and then I programmed in two others after he left the office and so between those four programs I was able to follow the conversation. I was able to adapt the hearing aids to the situation and the hearing aids do a quick acoustic analysis to see what's going on.

Blaise Delfino, M.S. - HIS :

Doug, in a recent paper that you published in September of 2024 in the Hearing Review, you talked about custom hearing aids and for you personally, so it was an op-ed you were talking about for me. I don't like to show people that I have hearing loss, but now, if you can just show our viewers now, you're wearing receiver in the canal or RIC hearing aids with custom ear molds. What made you make the decision to move forward now with a device that is still incredibly discreet but people can see that, oh, he's wearing hearing aids?

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

First of all, I think custom hearing aids are always a great entry point because the number one thing you know, we talk about affordability and access, and those are two of the three legs of that stool, and you know the FDA addressed access and affordability. So, access, I'm going to say they did a great job. You can buy hearing aids anywhere, right? Affordability not such a great job because they're so expensive. The OTCs the better ones, but the reason that most people don't seek hearing health care is, to me, neither of those.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

It's the issue of cosmetics and stigma, and you know there's lots of proof of that. I mean, we can go back to the 2017 article by Mike Valente and Amin Amlani, where they said you know, even if hearing aids were free, most people wouldn't want them, and they have evidence of this because you look at places like the EU, the UK, you look at New Zealand, australia, canada, where hearing aids are essentially free for the population, to the citizens. Hearing aids are essentially free for the population, to the citizens, and the uptake is about 40%. In other words, 60% of people say, even if they're free, no thanks. So I think cosmetics is actually a huge issue and I don't think that that's addressed by access and affordability. So in my mind there's three parts to this. I am just not that handsome of a guy, so if I have something like big and clunky over here, I feel Are you saying that we have faces for radio Doug?

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

We have faces for radio mostly Jeez man, and we're follically challenged.

Blaise Delfino, M.S. - HIS :

Yes, we are.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

But the thing is I just would never feel comfortable having, you know, a big beige banana over here or any such thing I feel like that makes me very self-conscious. So I've been wearing IICs for a couple of years and you know I was pretty comfortable with the ones I had. But then again, going back to this technology, the technology that attracted me to this product is not available in an IIC. You have all sorts of issues with antennas, you have real estate issues where you can't pack that much stuff into a tiny little hearing aid. So all of those things combined and then I thought if this is really really super good, I'm going to wear it all day long and that would make a huge difference to me. So having a custom fit ear mold and having this type of technology and, most importantly, having this result, it makes you worthwhile. So I'm willing to trade off because it is a physically reasonable, attractive product, having that rather than calling attention to itself.

Blaise Delfino, M.S. - HIS :

You wear glasses, so oftentimes patients will say, well, will the hearing aids get in the way when I put my glasses? So tell me, what has the comfort been like for you wearing Starkey Edge AI?

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

The comfort is fine. You know it doesn't feel like I'm wearing anything in there. It feels just like my glasses and like you are just taking them on and off. You know, if you're brand new to hearing aids it takes a little bit of thought and reflection to do it properly. But after three or four days you probably wouldn't notice they're there at all. I've been wearing hearing aids on and off for 20 or 30 years now and you know I wear these all day and you know it's kind of surprising at the end of the day. Oh yeah, I got to take that out.

Blaise Delfino, M.S. - HIS :

When I was in private practice we would have patients who say oh my gosh, I got in the shower by accident with my hearing aids and I'd say that's fine, that's okay. That means that they are so comfortable that you forgot that they were in or on your ear.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

And that's a fair point because, given the Starkey Edge AI, they are waterproof down to one meter. For whatever it is 20 or 30 minutes.

Blaise Delfino, M.S. - HIS :

30 minutes yeah, three feet of water for 30 minutes.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Okay, well, if you wear them in the shower for a minute and then you realize they're probably fine, Doug, I just want to thank you as a friend, partner and fellow podcaster.

Blaise Delfino, M.S. - HIS :

Thanks so much for dedicating your time this Saturday morning and I had a great time with you this past week at Starkey Day and it was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to the future, my friend.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Thanks, blaze. It was a real joy to be at Minneapolis for Starkey Day, and I want to be sure to thank Ken Collins for the excellent programming, and certainly Brandon, thank you for having me. Bill Austin, thank you for your friendship for almost 40 years. And, blaise, thanks for all you do for coordinating all of this and putting it together. It was a great experience. I learned a lot and the outcome has been spectacular.

Blaise Delfino, M.S. - HIS :

Doug, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to hop on here and chop it up about all things hearing healthcare To our listeners tuned in. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us at info at hearingmatterspodcastcom. You're tuned in to the Hearing Matters podcast and until next time, hear life's story.

People on this episode

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Blaise M. Delfino, M.S. - HIS

Host
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Dr. Douglas Beck

Co-host