It may be both presumptuous and too early to say that Apple's AirPods Pro are both a revolutionary and an inexpensive way to solve humanity's hearing loss problems, but a recent medical experiment has electrified the global medical community with its implications for those with auditory impairments.
Happy accidents
Sometimes, radical inventions, even ones in medicine, do not arise from the concerted and focused efforts of scientists to solve scourges that afflict humanity. Instead, they emerge from happy accidents that become life-saving necessities.
For instance, in 1928, Dr. Alexander Fleming left cultures of Staphylococcus aureus -- or "staph" as it is often known (which is essentially soft tissue infections such as abscesses and boils) -- for a couple of weeks. When he returned to check on them, he found that a mold had prevented their growth, thus bringing the world the life-saving antibiotic penicillin.
And, in 1968, when Wilson Greatbatch, an adjunct professor of engineering at the University of Buffalo was attempting to record heart sounds, he realized that the transistor he was using for the recording was emitting electrical pulses almost exactly like a human heart. This eventually led to a collaboration with a surgeon, William Chardack, and the two came up with another device that changed the world: The pacemaker.
Similarly, could a relatively inexpensive, commonplace device used by tens of millions around the world revolutionize the treatment for healing loss?
The experiment
Researchers at Taipei Veterans General Hospital conducted an experiment involving 21 individuals who suffered from mild to moderate hearing loss -- with the objective of determining how AirPods' Live Listen feature, first introduced in 2014, would stack up against a range of medical hearing aids. (Apple does not advertise Live Listen for people with hearing loss, but on its website, it does say that it does boost hearing abilities in noisy environments.)
The researchers read out a short sentence and then tested their subjects' hearing when wearing first a basic hearing aid, then a premium one, followed by a pair of Apple AirPods 2, and finally a pair of Apple AirPods Pro. The results were astounding.
In all scenarios except one, the AirPods Pro gave the hearing aids a run for their money. In a quiet environment, the pair of AirPods Pro, thanks to their noise-canceling feature, in addition to the Live Listen one, matched the experience of wearing basic hearing aids and were only slightly less effective than the premium ones. (The AirPods were linked to a smartphone).