Peter Blamey describes the Speech Perception Test
After the AGM, Peter Blamey presented on the IHearYou® technology, its characteristics and benefits. This talk built on the foundation Peter had laid in his June 2016 presentation.
He started by examining how the hearing aid industry suffers from poor public acceptance, even amongst people who could enjoy real benefits from the technology, and covered the common excuses often heard, things like the bother of visiting an audiologist, hearing aids that don't work well, and are expensive and hard to use. He outlined how he and his colleagues had worked to eliminate these objections by designing a system that works better, is significantly less expensive, and does not require an audiologist to set it up,
Peter explained that the current system adds significant costs in the audiologists testing and setup process, and the manufacturers' margins — resulting in a device with a manufacturing cost in the hundreds of dollars eventually costing many thousands of dollars, and how his system can be set up and tweaked by the user, both empowering them and saving a considerable amount of money.
He went on to describe their Online Speech Perception Test (SPT) and how it can, within certain limits, predict the audiogram — providing a useful tool for self-evaluation and preliminary device setup. He described the test, showed typical results, and demonstrated the correlation between the SPT and a traditional audiologist's audiogram.
Blamey then described how the Blamey Saunders devices can be user programmed with a Bluetooth adaptor to connect to a phone or PC and make changes. He then described their next generation hearing aids which are currently under development and will be manufactured in Melbourne.
Peter finished with a sobering graph which demonstrated the need to control healthcare costs, by predicting that the state's healthcare costs would exceed the state's total revenue income by the year 2043, so like all other healthcare areas the need to reduce hearing aid end costs is crucial.
The presentation ended with a lively Q&A session, with many attendees plying Peter with questions about a range of hearing and hearing aid questions.
