Starkey is reinventing hearing aids with artificial intelligence that tracks brain and body health and translates languages in real time. The innovation was deemed impossible a decade ago. Now the high-tech company is transforming how people communicate around the world. This week, Kristen Meinzer sits down with Achin Bhowmik, the chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering at Minneapolis-based Starkey, to discuss how his team is utilizing science to develop life-changing inventions. Invesco Distributors, Inc.
Starkey is reinventing hearing aids with artificial intelligence that tracks brain and body health and translates languages in real time. The innovation was deemed impossible a decade ago. Now the high-tech company is transforming how people communicate around the world. This week, Kristen Meinzer sits down with Achin Bhowmik, the chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering at Minneapolis-based Starkey, to discuss how his team is utilizing science to develop life-changing inventions. Invesco Distributors, Inc.
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MUSIC: BEETHOVEN SYMPHONY #6 IN F MAJOR
KRISTEN: According to the World Health Organization, nearly half a billion people suffer from disabling hearing loss. It’s likely that you or someone you know may deal with hearing loss now or in the future.
Today’s guest is working at the forefront of hearing aid technology to combat the effects of hearing loss so that the hearing impaired can communicate, connect, and thrive.
Achin Bhowmick: Hearing aids have a long history. Back in the days of Beethoven, he was using ear trumpets as hearing aids. Literally a funnel that he would put in his year. He was so hard of hearing that he had to turn back to his audience after finishing a performance, to see them clap because he could not hear them. So those days the technology, if you can call it that, was just a mechanical funnel, performing the function of a hearing aid.
KRISTEN: And as you can imagine, hearing aids have greatly advanced since the days of 19th century symphonies.
Achin Bhowmick:My gardener is a gentleman who speaks fluent Spanish, but not much English. [00:01:00]I can set my device such that when he speaks almost like a one-to-one translation as if there is somebody sitting in the middle, but it's near real time. He speaks Spanish, my hearing aid speaks English back to my ear.
BEAT
KRISTEN: This episode, I’m sitting down with Achin Bhowmick, a prolific inventor with dozens of patents to his name. He is the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Starkey, the largest hearing aid manufacturer in the United States.
Achin and the team at Starkey have brought hearing aids into the digital age.
They’re updating the previously clunky, dated devices with sophisticated design and high tech features, including live language translation.
It’s their hope that these wearable medical devices can be transformed from something that people have to wear to something that people want to wear.
I’m Kristen Meinzer, and this is Innovation Uncovered from Invesco QQQ...
Achin Bhowmick: Hahaha, yes.
Besides translating languages, we have the hearing aid technology that's in there enables it to perform the role of a digital assistant. So I can simply double tap my hearing aid and ask a question. What's the weather outside? When is my next meeting?
Or I can even ask it to remind me of a medication I might, you know, I might be taking multiple medicines. I forget when I need to take what medicine. I could ask it to remind me. And it will remind me in my ear privately to me.
Kristen Meinzer: One circumstance that is just hanging over all of us for the past year and a half is the pandemic. How has that affected how you work on your hearing aids and what kinds of things you're trying to address going forward?
Achin Bhowmick:
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I should mention a piece of technology that serendipitously became very, very helpful, during the pandemic. We were suddenly getting a lot of complaints about wearers of hearing aids, particularly struggling to understand conversation when people around them were wearing masks.
And so what we did as good engineers, we went to a lab and we evaluated the sound attenuation characteristics of the mask. Let's think about it.
If I'm wearing a mask in front of my mouth and I'm talking, the sound gets attenuated, as it goes through the mask.
We were able to develop a feature utilizing machine learning --which we call edge mode.
All you have to do is double-tap one side of the hearing aid and bring up personal assistant. Double tap on the other hearing aid and it instantly takes an acoustic snapshot of the environment around me.
It analyzes that data in a few milliseconds and makes necessary adjustments to the hearing aids, such that it overpowers the specific attenuations imparted by the masks.
[00:14:00]
We got very enthusiastic feedback from our patients who are saying, wow, I can now understand conversation, even when people around me are wearing masks when I was struggling.
Kristen Meinzer:Oh, that's incredible. Now you've talked a lot with us today about the engineering design of your hearing aids.
Can we talk just a little bit more about the physical design factors that you take into account when creating a wearable hearing device?
Achin Bhowmick: So that's, I have to say, all it comes down to because all of the functions that I mentioned, if I build all of that, and it becomes a big ugly device that just cannot be worn, it has no use.
Because we make different kinds of devices. We do have a particular type of hearing aid that is completely invisible today. So we take an impression of your inner ear, the ear canal, geometry, and then we can shape our hearing aid to perfectly fit in the bend of your ear canal that goes deep inside. Nobody knows you're wearing this device.
So the challenge is to incorporate all of these amazing functions that are small enough to be worn discreetly with a tiny battery that's built in, it needs to last all day.
[00:15:00]
And it needs to be comfortable such that I want to forget that I have the device on.
Hearing aids, as you think about them, they're in an extremely hostile environment.
The invisible hearing aids in the canal, guess what? You have ear wax and moisture and sweat. And in order to make them robust devices, we'd have to engineer protection.
So the design aspect, making them look cool, to the way they interact with smartphones and other devices. There's a mobile app that goes with it. There is a software that we provide for the hearing care professionals that they can use on their computer to program these devices.
So all of this is complex engineering work from concept to design, to development, to testing, to evaluation, and finally to the market.
TRANSITION
KRISTEN: The focus of Starkey’s technology is to support individuals with hearing loss…
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but Achin imagines a future where this technology becomes mainstream. He sees a world where his hearing devices are used by an even broader population... that may not be hearing impaired at all.
And from what I can tell, the possibilities at hand put my Bluetooth headphones to shame.
Achin and the team at Starkey have successfully combined style with power in this life changing technology, but it has required their dedicated effort. Luckily, they don’t shy away from a challenge.
Kristen Meinzer: You've done so much to create technology so people can communicate so that we can connect with others. But I can't imagine it's all been easy. I'm sure there've been a lot of obstacles your team has faced along the way. Can you tell us about some of those?
Achin Bhowmick: You know, one of my favorite quotes is if it's difficult, we're going to do it right away. If it's impossible, we'll work on it. And it's likely going to take a bit longer.
[00:17:00]
In the realm of AI and machine learning, what we're doing today, collectively as a society was deemed to be impossible just 10 years ago.
And the advances have been made possible by amazing progress in sensor technologies, data. You heard about big data and massive data.
All of this enabled artificial intelligence to be where it is today. So constantly exploring the boundary between possibility and impossibility.
Kristen Meinzer: Is your dream that all consumers, not just those who are hearing impaired wear these hearing aids eventually?
Achin Bhowmick: We make these devices that are custom made. They are mechanically shaped to perfectly fit my ear canals. And they're acoustically programmed according to my needs so I use these devices, even though I do not have hearing loss.
I benefit from using my hearing aids when I'm in a restaurant, having a meeting in a loud environment. And of course I'm using it to take phone calls, listen to audio books, check my steps. Hopefully I don't fall. But if I do, you know, my wife is going to get alerted.
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Kristen Meinzer: Oh, wow. Oh, that's incredible.
Achin Bhowmick: A device that not only tells me when it fell, but would predict if I'm going to fall because of the way I'm walking.
It tells me before even I know I have a problem and I need to pay attention to it because I might have an upcoming health issue and the devices with embedded sensors and machine learning AI would be able to predict when I might have a problem.
So we are literally on a journey to convert these hearing aids into our very own personal assistant that helps me hear better, helps me communicate with people and then helps me with information.
So when I look at, let's say very far into the future, these devices are going to provide such value and benefit. We want to convert them into, I want to wear rather than I use them because I need to. So there's the future where, because it helps me hear better, helps me communicate better. It doesn't matter if I speak the native language or not. It is a smart device that connects me to the world of information. It reminds me what I need to do when I need to do it.
And you see that in science fiction movies.
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But, you know, what was science-fiction years ago now is reality. Similarly, what is science fiction today is going to become reality soon enough.
Kristen Meinzer: And what's next for you?When we hang up the phone, you're going to go off and do something else. And five years from now, you're going to do something else. What's next on your horizon?
MUSIC UP
Achin Bhowmick: As soon as we’re done, you know, get back to work because we have just exciting developments in the pipe right now, you know, we talk about five years from now, 10 years from now, what you forget is that the bridge to that is today and tomorrow.
Kristen Meinzer: Achin thank you so much for joining us today.
Achin Bhowmick: Thank you very much. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.
OUTRO
KRISTEN: Thanks for listening to Innovation Uncovered from Invesco QQQ.
On the next episode, we’ll hear from Caren Kelleher, the founder and CEO of Gold Rush Vinyl, the company that’s giving vinyl a new spin.
[00:20:00]
Caren: There really is an opportunity within vinyl. And it felt like a space where there hadn't been a lot of innovation where maybe I could bring lessons from Silicon valley into an industry that was having a resurgence and do some big things.
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Thanks for listening.
The opinions expressed are those of the speakers are based on current market conditions and are subject to change. Without notice these opinions may differ from those of other Invesco investment professionals. Invesco is not affiliated with T brand studio, Kristen Meinzer or any of the subjects or companies referenced in this episode. This content should not be construed as an endorsement for or a recommendation to invest in any of the companies referenced in this episode, Invesco Distributors.