The Next Sound You Hear

“That’s really neat, especially for our baby boomers, who are just starting to get mostly high-frequency loss,” such as consonants, says Cami Lawless, a hearing-aid dispenser at Associated Hearing in Maplewood. “These are the situations that kill them, so when you can do that demonstration, it really is a wow effect.” Lawless also says that with Destiny, Starkey has significantly improved the accuracy of its fitting software, or how close a just-from-the-factory hearing aid gets its intended patient to normal hearing levels without adjustment.

In addition, Destiny has been designed to minimize a perpetual bane in the hearing aid industry—namely, feedback. Feedback can happen whenever a wearer puts her hand up to her ear, picks up a telephone, or gives someone a hug, because sound leaking from the hearing aid gets bounced from the speaker back into the hearing aid’s microphone. This causes a squawk as the sound is re-amplified. Hearing aids have incorporated feedback cancellation technology for years, but feedback is still a problem.

That’s particularly true when the wearer uses the phone. Hearing aids typically incorporate a small device called a telecoil, or T-coil, that turns off the aid’s microphones and instead receives the phone’s signal via a magnetic field transmission. With a T-coil, “amplified sound leaking out around the hearing aid shells and through the vent no longer can be picked up by the microphone,” Dybala says. But the process isn’t seamless or foolproof. “Traditionally, you had to push a button or flip a switch” to activate the T-coil, Lawless says.

By contrast, Destiny contains a piece of nanotechnology called a giant magnetoresistance (GMR) switch, which uses electron spin rather than magnetic charge to sense signals and store information. Developed for Starkey by Eden Prairie–based NVE Corporation, the sensors consist of layers of magnetic thin films just a few atomic layers thick—about one-third the size of the mechanical reed switches that hearing aids typically use. This makes the sensors small and sensitive enough to use in even the smallest of hearing aids—a completely-in-the-canal (CIC) device—and allows the Destiny aid to quickly switch modes automatically as a wearer picks up a phone. And this isn’t a help solely over the phone lines. “We’re hearing that for the first time that people don’t want to take their hearing aids out even when they go to bed, because they’re not getting any feedback from the pillow,” Trine says.

With Destiny, Starkey became the first company to incorporate nanotechnology into its hearing aid microphones to all but eliminate hearing aid feedback and allow for easy use with all types of phones. “Using nanotech components lays the groundwork for being able to bring more advantages to users in a much smaller space,” industry observer Dybala says. “Just the fact that [Starkey was] able to do it is pretty important.”

According to Ruzicka, just a month after releasing Destiny, Starkey’s run rate was well ahead of his projection that it would sell a million units in a year’s time. But Ruzicka also knows that Starkey’s competitors will strive to catch up to Destiny within a year or two. “It’s really kind of like an arms race that benefits the consumer,” Dybala says.