Why General Chips Are the Next Big Leap in Hearing Device Technology

Hello, and thank you for joining the Hearing Review podcast on the MEDQOR Podcast station. I am Kathryn Sutherland, chief editor of the Hearing Review Journal. Today I am speaking with CEO of Orka, Ben Sun, a former hardware engineer at Apple, that left life in the big tech to design and launch a hearing aid product called Orka one. Ben will be speaking with us about the role of a chip inside a hearing aid and how technology innovates the hearing aid space. Welcome Ben, and thank you for joining us today. Can you share more about Orka, your background, and what Orka is doing differently in the hearing healthcare space?

Absolutely. Thank you Catherine for having me. My name is Ben Sun, I’m CEO and co-founder of Orka. To begin with, I want to just give a quick overview of what Orka is. So Orka is what I would call an end-to-end hearing aid provider. We design, manufacturer, engineer our own hearing aid products, and then we sell directly to our customers. And on top of that, we provide complete remote audiology service to our customer with our in-house audiology team. And the biggest change that we want to bring to the hearing industry is really taking stress out of the whole process. So the whole company was originally started because my grandma was having hearing loss and then I was kind of just going through the whole process with her. And for her it was quite expensive at the time, and that created a lot of stress.

And after a while she was complaining about hearing a noise and she ended up not using her hearing aids that much after the first month. So at the time I was just really approaching this from a design and engineering perspective and saw a lot of things that we can change as an industry where we can make the whole journey, the product, the service, more user-friendly, and then we could finally pull stress out of the whole process and make it something that people will actually want to wear. So Orka is really going after this idea of creating the next generation of hearing aids that people want to wear.

That it’s a perfect place to be in today’s market. And with over the counter in the United States being approved by the federal government and live as of October, 2022, the whole industry is changing. And I do see the innovations coming out of the technology. I would really like to know more about your technology and what’s behind the technology and the chip that you’ve selected in the Orka hearing aids.

So I think to start with, the technology path that Orka is on, I want to just go back in history a bit and look at how history as a product has really advanced over the years. So originally that was there were those non-electric hearings that would just physically, that was amplifying sounds. And then over time we were able to come up with the electric hearing aids that use transistors that amplified sound. But at that time you couldn’t really do any computation or changes to the sound. So everything was just kind of have this flat line amplification.

And then it was year ’96. Now the industry, we’ve had the first commercially successful digital hearings, that is the first modern digital hearings that we know as of today. And in the past 20 or more years, the digital hearing aids has been really taken over. And now we see a new technology pass that is based on a more general purposes chip platform that is more similar to what we see in smartphones and computers. And the biggest advantage of being on a more general purpose chip platform is that previously when you have those digital hearing aid chips, they work really well, but they’re based on a specialized chip technology, which meant that these chips are designed to perform a [inaudible 00:05:00] predetermined tasks. So hearing aids can perform perfectly fine with low power consumption, and they perform really well just like the Nokia phones. But one thing that they couldn’t quite do is, it’s quite hard to upgrade once the product is manufactured.

But we’re so familiar with downloading upgrades to our phones and even cars these days, and those technology really require the flexibility of a general purpose chip. So that’s why we believe general purpose chips are the next big leap in hearing aid technology, is because it really allows the flexibility that we bring new shorter iteration loop to hearing aids. And that’s why Orka has been working the past four years of designing a hearing aid device that is based around this general purpose chip platform. And to give you a quick example of what that looks like, we used to have this little chime sounds for low battery alerts. And then after we talked with our users and they were telling us that it wasn’t straightforward enough, so we quickly changed the actual announcement like low battery when it’s actually low battery, the feature was done within two weeks and then we were able to release it in the next update.

So I believe that in the short term, being based on this more flexible chip platform really allows us to iterate faster in answer to some of our user feedback. And in the long run, this is something that I personally gets very excited about, is general chip’s platform I do believe will enable the incorporation of the latest AI technology and the advancement of that and really solve the ultimate challenge that hearing aids has, which is to enable speech and noise. So we believe that the current biggest challenge of wanting a hearing aid to be able to extract human voice with low latency and really just amplify that in a complex dynamic environment, that challenge we’ll be able to solve in the long run being on this new general chip platform because it has more computation power. And then at the same time, the architecture is flexible enough that we can always incorporate those latest software advancement and apply that to the hearing aid world.

Is that what we would call processing power? And let’s talk a little bit about processing power. How will that impact hearing aids?

Yeah, so I think one thing that when we look at the consumer electronic space, I mean you were at CS and you probably saw all these amazing applications that was being done on a more general purpose chip. So because there are so much need for different applications that are based on the general purpose chip, the volume that those chips are being made are much bigger than a specific application. So the industry is able to make those chips with more advanced chip fabrication technologies, say the latest, the seven nanometer or even the five nanometer technologies. These technologies are really expensive. And to fabricate a batch of those ships really require a volume that can sustain it economically. And because that general purpose chips can be used to power all different kinds of applications, we can afford to use a chip that is being fabricated on a much more advanced chip net technology. And in return with a comparable power consumption, now we have a lot more computation power that can be deployed to handle those very complex real-time computation, that can really help the speech and noise problem that hearing aids are trying to solve.

So this is something that we think that is really going to push the product category forward in the next two to three years. So we’re really excited about that.

So Ben, please share more about the Orka hearing aids and the technology with a little bit more explanation that you’re using.

Yeah, absolutely. So we believe that just by being on a new technology path, it alone doesn’t create enough value for hearing aid users. So we’re really approaching this as wanting to design an overall stress-free experience for our users. So in order to do this, we have a vertically integrated system that is based around the general chip application. We create our service, a remote service module, around our product. We create an entire app around the product, and we also have our own fitting tool to enable remote fitting as well. So we’re not really just tackling one thing. We’re creating the Orka version of the entire experience. And what we’re seeing is that a lot of users that we’re working with, they’re first time users and they have been on the fence of not sure if they wanted hearing aids.

So one thing that we are doing is we are actually give doing this free try-on program that is zero down payment with no catch. And we call it no cash because users are often skeptical and they ask us, what is the catch? No catch. For us, it’s about really introducing people to hearing aids and then as soon as they can start to experience what those products do for them, they will stay. So that was just one example of what a stress-free experience looks for our users, and we make sure that this is consistent in our product design of how you would wear the hearing aids and then in our app design, how you would interact with hearing aids. So as a result, we’re seeing our users on average have a much shorter wait time before they take action. And we believe this is great for the industry.

I would agree with you, and I really think that’s an innovative idea to offer free trials. Very, very few manufacturers offer that and could see how people would definitely take you up on that. And why not? There’s nothing to lose at that point if you’re concerned about your hearing loss. I don’t have any more questions for you today, Ben. Do you have anything else that you would like to share with our listeners?

No, I think the only last thing that I kind of want to talk about is the sort of the whole OTC thing that was all over the news. And I kind of just want to touch a bit more on that, saying that it’s at Orka, we’re in great support, total support of the OTC rule, but I just want to use this opportunity to emphasis that we are seeing, even though we’re a newcomer to the industry and we’re selling directly to our customers, but we see so much value in providing good care in all of the users that we interact with. So I want to just talk about that. Sometimes people kind of mixed up DTC and OTC, but I believe selling directly to customers, it’s not just about selling directly to customers, it’s about talking directly with your customers, having a direct relationship with your customer and having a shorter feedback loop that you can always improve on your product and your service.

And for Orka, we’re not going OTC yet, it’s because we were not going self-fit yet because we’re seeing so much value in audiology. So as one of our co-founder would say, Xinke, she has hearing loss since age 13 and she would say that there’s so much value in the first audiology that you work with, that would then help you through the journey or the learning, the initial learning, to get you over the initial learning curve. So for us, I just want to use this opportunity to say that even with OTC, that we’re seeing tremendous value in good service and we’re offering that in a remote setting. And all of our focus is how can we create a remote care system that is on top of a new technology platform but that still captures what you would get in a more offline setting. And I believe that this is something that is important for the industry as a whole, that we introduce first time customers with enough support and with good audiology service.

Agreed. I think that having someone do your hearing aid testing and even possibly hearing aid fitting, even if it is remote, but with the guidance of a professional, is going to make a big difference in how well you accept your hearing aids and how well they accept you and how they work together to enhance your hearing health quality. I agree with you 100%. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Ben. It was so nice to talk to you. I am sure that our listeners will be excited to learn more about Orka and more about the hearing aids that you’re offering and the services and technology that are available through your company.

Thank you so much, Katherine.