AUGMENTED HEARING IS A FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE PROJECTBRINGING YOU AN ALTERNATIVE TO HEARING AIDS
The hearing aid space is antiquated and overpriced and badly in need of a widely available and easy to use open source alternative. 5 manufacturers control 99% of the global market, and have little incentive to innovate or compete on prices, so hearing aids cost thousands of Euros. Everyone we meet has either themselves or through a loved one had a bad experience with hearing aids, or experienced quality of life issues with hearing loss. We've been working on making an alternative with our knowledge of professional audio technology, which has long outpaced the medical hearing aid realm.
The hearing aid industry is worth an estimated $9.8 billion, and shows signs of cartel pricing. It is slow to adopt progress in audio technology. The sound quality, feedback, and ease of use of hearing aids can be awful, especially considering that they are often meant for seniors. We do not hope to enter the industry of medically-accredited devices, due to gatekeeping, and do not call our project a “hearing aid” – but we hope to outperform it still. We will call it hearing enhancement. There are commercial efforts to enter this space, including by the leading technology corporations. These are sometimes more accessible, but proprietary, and raise privacy concerns. They include many smartphone apps that are predatory, operating on a subscription model that puts them out of range for many people, especially in the poorer areas of the world. There have been some open source efforts to solve these problems. We analyzed their progress with interest. We are learning from their shortcomings and strengths, and building a technology that is easy to ue and accessible.
Rustic Audio:
Rust-based DSP for voice cleaning
by Brett Preston
It allows you to record voice, apply a DSP effects chain tailored to cleaning voice recordings, and encode it as a highly compressed Opus file. It was created for settings where bandwidth is scarce, such as powerful privacy-preserving communication, but we still want to preserve the legibility and quality of voice recording. Any project pursuing low-footprint, efficiently computed and good quality voice recordings may be interested in using it. Created with the support of NLnet foundation. Available at http://github.com/brettpreston/Rustic_Audio, and https://crates.io/crates/rustic_audio_tool.
CUBETOPIA
A game about building a better world, made with the support of Chaos Computer Club to celebrate its 42 years of groundbreaking innovation. I was the main developer, composer, sound designer and 3D artist. Available to play at http://cubetopia.art
