Reading guide:9month10In the early morning,Apple held a new product launch conference,It will be announcedAirpods Pro2Will add hearing health-related functions,In addition to the passive noise reduction hearing protection mode that is activated by default,Apple will also launch a"Clinical-grade"Hearing aid mode,Users can conduct a clinically verified hearing test,Provide users with regular hearing test services,Users only need to understand their hearing status through simple settings and operations,If hearing loss is detected, users can use hearing aid mode。 According to reports, the hearing health test and hearing aid feature will be launched in the fall of 2024, in which the hearing aid function is currently being approved by the FDA and other regulatory agencies, and Apple says the feature will be available in more than 100 countries. Hearing loss
The human auditory system is one of the important ways to perceive the world, hearing plays a vital function in all stages of life, the human ear carries out acoustic-electrical transformation with the help of the hair cells in the cochlea, there are more than 3,000 inner hair cells and more than 10,000 external hair cells in the cochlea, they play a role in transmitting sound in the auditory system, due to the damage and death of hair cells can not be regenerated, when the hair cells in the inner ear are less and less, hearing will be worse and worse, and even deaf, hearing loss is irreversible. If left unaddressed, hearing loss can have a negative impact on many aspects of life, such as communication, language development, cognition, education, and relationships.
In March 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) released its first World Report on Hearing, which updated the degree of hearing loss to six using a new adult hearing rating methodology: mild, moderate, moderately severe, severe, very severe, and total hearing loss/total deafness. According to the World Report on Hearing released by the World Health Organization in 2019, hearing loss currently affects more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, of which 430 million have moderate or above hearing loss, and it is expected that by 2050, 2.5 billion people worldwide will have some degree of hearing loss, of which at least 700 million will need rehabilitation services.
Figure 1: Global number of people with hearing loss (100 million people)
Data source: World Health Organization, let-find data collation
Hearing impairment can cover the whole population, among which the elderly are the group that needs to be paid attention to, and hearing loss with age is one of the most common diseases among the elderly, and about one-third of the world's elderly over 65 years old have moderate or above hearing loss. Previously, according to CCTV News, the mainland is currently the country with the largest number of people with hearing disabilities (corresponding to moderate to severe hearing loss: higher than 50dB (decibels)) in the world.
According to statistics, there are 27.8 million people with hearing disabilities in mainland China, and the number of people with hearing disabilities accounts for more than 30% of the country's disabled people. According to the China Hearing Health Report (2021), presbycusis occupies the first place in the cause of hearing disability, accounting for 51.61%. As China enters an aging society, the number of people aged 65 and above in China has reached 210 million in 2022, accounting for 14.90% of the total population. Hearing loss is one of the common diseases of the elderly, and the continuous increase in the elderly population is expected to bring new demand to the hearing screening and rehabilitation industry in the future. Figure 2: Causes of hearing disability in mainland China
Data source: China Hearing Health Report (2021), Laimi data collation
The convergence of consumer headphones and assistive listening functions
The human cochlea is an acoustic frequency divider, under normal circumstances, the hearing frequency range of the human ear is 20-20000Hz (Hz), the hearing loss caused by the aging of the elderly due to aging and organ aging is generally in the sound range of 50-10000Hz, the interaction between the outer hair cells responsible for the signal "crossover" and the inner hair cells responsible for the signal "input" can make the human body "turn up" the signal you want to hear and "turn down" the noise you don't want to hear in the noisy environment under the instructions of the central nervous system. Maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). 90% of hearing impairment is damage to the hair cells in the cochlea that are responsible for different frequency regions, and the essence of hearing aids is to allow patients to hear sounds that are not within their hearing frequency range by taking sound frequencies with different thresholds and gaining them.
Hearing aid is a small amplification device that compensates for the patient's hearing loss, belongs to the second class of medical devices, is used to improve the patient's hearing, is a relatively economical and widely used hearing aid, its working principle is to collect sound through the microphone and convert it into electrical signals, and then process the electrical signals through the amplifier, and at the same time carry out optimization processing such as noise reduction, so that the amplified sound can be heard by the ear with residual hearing.
In recent years, with the development of artificial intelligence technology, some manufacturers have begun to integrate AI technology into hearing aids to improve the hearing experience of hearing aids in noisy environments, including automatic evaluation of the relative position of the sound source and the hearing aid microphone in the space, the detection of noise in the space, Speech priority determination in complex environments, etc., provides the wearer with the optimal signal-to-noise ratio through complex computing analysis.
Figure 3: Grading of hearing loss and the corresponding auditory experience
Data source: World Health Organization, let-find data collation
In addition to the technological innovation of hearing aids themselves, the new OTC (over-the-counter) hearing aid category established by the United States FDA in August 2022 has had a significant impact on the entire hearing aid industry. United States background of the FDA's new hearing aid category is that the configuration of traditional hearing aids requires a doctor (audiologist) to prescribe and prescribe, and the entire hearing aid market is controlled by global giants, and the cost of the cumbersome prescription fitting process is superimposed, and the average price of hearing aids is higher than the average monthly income of United States, which greatly hinders the improvement of hearing aid penetration in the context of the increasing number of hearing loss.
The establishment of the OTC hearing aid category represents a certain degree of openness in the market originally controlled by the giants, and users with mild to moderate hearing loss can directly purchase hearing aids through more transparent online e-commerce and adjust the hearing aids according to the corresponding mobile app, which is more convenient for the people and helps to promote competition in the industry and improve the audience of hearing aids. For the major consumer headphone giants, one of the existing functional hotspots is to embed the assistive listening function into the headphones, such as the "Conversation Boost" function released by Apple at the developer conference for AirPods Pro in June 2021, which is actually a dialogue noise reduction algorithm in the listening aid scene plus a certain vocal gain. Huawei's previously released FreeBuds earbuds also have a built-in assistive listening function, and users can make personalized gain compensation according to their hearing conditions by turning on "Hearing Optimization" after completing the hearing test. As the true wireless earbuds (TWS) industry as a whole enters the era of fierce competition, whether it is "hearing aids" or OTC hearing aids, they all use the core algorithm of hearing aid function, that is, to make different gains for hearing loss at different frequencies, and the volume and loudness can be adjusted according to different frequency bands, so that the hearing loss can hear the sound clearly without excessive amplification of the sound, and protect the hearing of the hearing loss, and the boundary between TWS and OTS hearing aids equipped with the "hearing aid" function has begun to blur. Even TWS without hearing aid at all is entirely possible to meet the requirements of OTC hearing aids through improvements.
Figure 4: Differences in scenarios and algorithms between hearing aids and headphones
Data source: "Hearing Aid Headphones/OTC Hearing Aids" industry white paper, let's find data collation
With the acceleration of China's aging society and the improvement of residents' health awareness, domestic hearing aid sales have maintained a double-digit growth trend, according to Wind data, domestic hearing aid sales will reach 14.05 million in 2021, with an annualized growth rate of 15.34% in the past 10 years. As a class II medical device, hearing aids in the primary market in recent years still receive capital attention, the main reason is that the current hearing aid high-end market is mostly monopolized by imported brands, public data show that Switzerland Phonak, Denmark Oticon, Denmark Weiting, Denmark ReSound, United States Starkey and Germany Siemens (now Signia) represented by the six major brands of imported hearing aids occupy about 90% of the market share, domestic brand share is less than 10%, In the context of the continuous increase in the penetration rate of domestic hearing aids, the development of domestic hearing aids is expected to achieve domestic replacement of hearing aids.
In the field of assistive hearing, the combination of traditional consumer headphones and hearing aids is expected to introduce new players to the hearing aid market at the same time, so that the "disability" image of hearing aids is more consumer-oriented Related algorithm solvers are expected to gain greater capital attention.
According to the data of Laimei PEVC, in recent years, there have been a number of financing cases in the field of hearing aids, most of which are early financing, and the highest financing case in recent years is the nearly 100 million yuan A round of financing of Boyin Hearing.
Figure 6: Financing of the domestic hearing aid track in recent years
Data source: Let's find data
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