Justin Miller, Co-Founder and CEO of Nuheara, the leading company in the augmented hearing space, recently explained the motivations and inspirations behind co-founding the company with David Cannington.
Having struggled with hearing loss in one ear for most of his life, Justin has a strong connection to this issue and has lived through the everyday frustrations that come along with it. Justin was fed up with every conversation feeling like a chore, and hearing aids seemed too extreme; there had to be an answer. As a result, the concept of IQbuds was born.
The motivation behind the development of IQbuds was to prevent people from going through the same tribulations Justin faced. For years, the only option was to buy a hearing aid that amplified all noise instead of just amplifying specific sounds. Justin saw this as a unique opportunity to provide a solution for anyone who found themselves in similar circumstances.
Now more than ever, IQbuds have the potential to help others. With the official passing of the Over The Counter Hearing Aid Act 2017 in the USA, innovative assistive audio devices like IQbuds can be in the hands of millions who suffer from moderate hearing loss, significantly improving their lives through Nuheara’s super intelligent noise control technology. Justin and the team at Nuheara are on the path of fulfilling his mission of producing affordable and accessible intelligent hearing alternatives to those in need just like himself.
Watch and hear Justin and Nuheara’s story in his own words:
IQbuds Inspiration Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Justin Miller, the CEO and co-founder of Nuheara. And today I’m reaching out and we’re going to talk a little bit about my hearing loss and how that’s motivated IQbuds today.
The whole concept of Nuheara and David and my motivation for co-founding it wasn’t necessarily my personal issues but for those that we’d seen over the course of a decade in industrial hearing, the struggles that people had in relation to their own hearing loss. And we heard it a million times, “How do I get something like this, someone develop something for a restaurant and the like?” Because hearing aids in general had struggled with that whole concept of amplification of all noise rather than just speech.
Nuheara, and IQbuds as a product, we wanted to develop something that was appropriate for everyone in every sort of circumstance. And that’s where the motivation for the product came from.
My own hearing experience and my own hearing loss, I have loss in one ear, it is quite debilitating and as I get older it gets progressively worse. And what IQbuds enables me to do is balance myself out. With hearing loss in one ear I’ve got the ability to set the profile in such a way that it allows me to hear.
Although I’ve been prescribed a hearing aid, I don’t find it acceptable to wear at all times. I need some assistance in certain situations and those situations, more often than not, are noisy social settings. And that’s when I need some assistance, so a bar or restaurant or places where there are other noise and I’m trying to have a conversation. So the whole IQbuds is technology, it’s quite unique in the sense that we’re able to provide some assistance to those people that need it in those sort of situations.
So the introduction of the OTC legislation, the passing of the OTC legislation in the US, has provided us with a significant opportunity. So for those that are unaware, the legislation passed sees that people that have a mild to moderate loss no longer need to go to an audiologist and have a prescribed hearing aid and have a prescribed fitting. Now it’s not our ambition to be a hearing aid, but what we do have is a technology that suits those people from a mild to moderate loss. And that is in that situation where your hearing loss is first noticed are generally noisy social settings. And our unique technology enables us to remove the background noise and promote the conversation at hand.
And so for those with mild to moderate loss, what the OTC legislation has done has brought some awareness and I guess some free enterprise into a space that was really strictly controlled. And with the right technology, and technology has rapidly improved to the point where consumer electronics has fast met the hearing aid industry, is providing us with a significant opportunity to bring all these parts of the function together and provide some assistance to those people at a price that’s not cost prohibitive. So at a few hundred dollars we’re a long way removed from the average fifteen hundred dollars per ear, in the US at least anyway, that people are paying for hearing aids. And those hearing aids go right up, with some smarter technology, right up into the $10,000 price point. But they’re still struggling to meet the need for people that need some assistance in noisy social settings. And generally speaking, if you’ve got a hearing loss that’s where you need the assistance. So with our product we’re providing a solution that meets that need.
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