People do incredible things with their hearing, and it can drive such emotion and feeling in your body and in your mind. Those things are really what the technology helps to deliver to people.
When we started this project, we were really trailblazing. We were trying to bring together cutting-edge hearing technology and ANC in a true wireless earbud form factor. And no one had done that before.
Some of the big challenges were the acoustic design and to find a suitable speaker.
The very first prototypes didn’t work. We couldn’t generate any kind of noise cancellation. And we had to completely redesign.
And then, at one stage, you just get this aha experience. And you figure it out. Ear ID was an incredible technology to develop. We were trying to take what was a process traditionally administered by people and integrate that into an app. We partnered with NAL, National Acoustics Labs, to bring in their NAL-NL2 technology. And we actually ran a clinical study with them as well. Ear ID takes a user through a full personalization experience, and it customizes all the hearing technology in their right to their own hearing.
At Nuheara we have pretty much all the electro-acoustic testing equipment we need for these kind of projects. We have the latest KEMAR with anthropometric ears. And we control everything with soundcheck. We did lots and lots of prototyping and measurements in-house.
The in-ear mic is really the exciting point about the whole system. And you can use it for better speech augmentation and better noise reduction. So it improves your whole listening experience. For the noise reduction, there are three different options. One is active noise cancellation.
World off.
Second is the feature like sync, which is noise control. And third is a focus, which [INAUDIBLE]forming.
Focus on.
So it’s all this combination together makes it very unique.
I love working on the max project because of the capability of the [INAUDIBLE] to process so many things at one time and producing a product like that on a small scale. It’s very exciting and very complex.
Quality assurance is so important because we have to deliver what the customer wants. We have to try and think what the customer might do which the engineers haven’t thought of.
Perth’s really a cultural mixing pot. We have people who come from all over the world to live here because it’s just an amazing environment. And what that means is for a technology company like ours, we can actually get the very best people into our company. COVID-19 has been such a worldwide tragedy. And it absolutely threw up some incredible challenges for us.
We had to come up with new ways to communicate and work with our manufacturing partner in Malaysia. Usually we would be site during early stages of production. We had do it all remotely. We’d be looking at prototypes and first articles through teleconferencing. We had to set up new systems to transfer data and all our production line yield information and test information. COVID-19 did impact us, and it caused some delays, but we weren’t willing to ship until we knew that the quality was there.
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When it first gets into your customer’s hands, it’s really like a– really like a, you know, maybe– I don’t want to compare it to my children because that’s a bit too close to home, but we just hope that our customers are getting an amazing experience.
The best part of my job is when you see a good customer review because you feel that you have delivered the quality that they have asked for.
There was a guy who said I could hear in his daughter’s wedding. And that give me huge satisfaction that it helped somebody. And wants his life to make his life better.
It really is a dream to be able to help and develop a product like that. And I’m very fortunate to have that opportunity here.
They’re absolutely amazing.
Amazing.
