Dr. Konstantina Stankovic

The indirect link is super well established because we know that hearing loss leads to social isolation, to depression, and cognitive decline.

In fact, the cost of unaddressed hearing loss

is the staggering nearly trillion dollars annually.

With a T. Absolutely.

Whoa.

Yes.

And it's because people have issues getting employed.

They may not get the best jobs that they would like to be qualified for.

All of arrangements that have to be done to make them as fully functional as possible are very costly.

So indeed, it's an enormous problem that really needs more focus, more attention, and more research to develop new therapies.

Some people are better than others and

As we've been discussing all along, it's not that one size fits all.

All of us are a little different, and some people are better at some things than others, and people lip read to different degrees depending on all sorts of things.

Their innate predisposition, their potential hearing loss that they may not even know,

artistic nature where they are analyzing a face all the time, their engagement and interest in what's being said.

So going back to your question about the cocktail party environment, it's a problem that

for standard hearing aids in an environment like that because they tend to amplify everything including that background noise.

So that has led to a new generation of hearing aids that are AI informed and really are performing auditory scene analysis in real time to pick up signal from noise and

to reduce amplification of the noise and reduce feedback.

So that's an active area of research.