Back in 2007, Amy Tenderich wrote about the need for Apple to share its renowned industrial design and user-friendliness with the medical device community. Her plea wasn’t necessarily for Apple to get involved in the field, but rather for it to help device manufacturers innovate and produce devices that people might actually want to use. As it turns out, Apple may be be joining the fray anyway: the iPhone, with its App Store and recently-added support for third party peripherals, may soon become an extremely powerful medical tool.
We’ve still got a ways to go before we start seeing glucose monitors and blood pressure pumps pop up with iPhone support, but some health and disability-related apps are already beginning to emerge. One of the first is a new application called soundAMP (iTunes Link), a hearing aid application that was just released on the App Store, and is available for $9.99.
The application is pretty straightforward: it takes everything that reaches the phone’s microphone, and makes it louder. You can manually adjust just how powerful you’d like the sound amplification to be, and can also choose from several different equalizer settings to specify which frequencies you’d like boosted most. There are also a number of handy features for repeating something if you missed it the first time: a button at the top of the app will replay the last five seconds of everything you’ve heard, and there’s also a button that lets you listen through a 30 second buffer of recent audio.
As far as the microphone goes, you can choose to either use the built-in mic on the handset, or an external mic, like the one that’s built into the standard iPhone headphones. In my testing I found that using the phone’s mic worked better than the headphone mic, largely because you can direct it towards whatever you’d like to listen to.
So how well does it actually work? Truth be told, I’ve had little experience with ‘real’ hearing aids, so I’m not entirely sure how well this stacks up as far as volume and microphone quality go. And frankly, if you’ve got significant and long-term hearing problems, you would be much better off with a device dedicated to the purpose instead of having to carry an iPhone with you at all times. But for more casual use — be it in a lecture hall with a quiet speaker, or a wedding when when you want to make sure you hear every word that’s being spoken — this could definitely prove useful. In my testing all sounds became significantly louder, though never to the point that they were painfully loud. That said, it isn’t perfect — I noticed that ambient noise like fans can become irritating at higher levels, which seems like something the app could filter out.
Finally, even if you’re not hard of hearing, soundAMP is worth checking out. It’s surprisingly fun to give yourself superhuman hearing while you’re just walking down the street.
I am getting alot of iPhone app developers posting health & Fitness apps to http://www.appgiveaway.com and let me tell you they are certainly proving popular with our registered users.
soundAmp sounds like an interesting app, I am looking forward to featuring the app on our website and possibly testing the app myself.
Still Game apps for the iPhone are leading the way
Sounds like a handy app.
sounds is intesting app, i like
What can’t the iPhone do?
What can’t the iPhone do? Make your life fulfilling. ;-P
needs shotgun/prabolic micraphone for birding
I have used all different type of hearing aids and they all have one issue, they can’t hear Tinnitus.
If I could only control how at hear at that moment in time, I think this app would be great.
What about the battery though??
I like it
Third party iphone peripherals could be very disruptive to niche industries (glucose monitors, hearing aids, etc.). Should be interesting to see if Apple helps manufacturers in the medical device space. Could be helpful to those with such needs.
Can you use this with a Bluetooth headset? This concept can also work with students in classrooms or other situations where you would want to surreptitiously replay what someone has said and listen to it discretely on a small Bluetooth headset.
$10 for something that just “makes sounds louder” is WAY too expensive.
This extremely simple app should definitely be a 99 cent or free app.
Yep. That’s what we thought as well. Check out iHearClear and Amplitude (links are in my post below).
I’m happy to extend a coupon code for iHearClear to anyone interested in trying it out. Limited to the first three requests, though. Just drop me a note on Twitter saying “I’d like to try iHearClear for iPhone @darrengaustin”
Amplitude for iPhone does the exact same thing for .99 cents. I just bought it because I didn’t want to spend $10 just to test this one. Now I have $9 left for other apps.
Just bought Listen Up as well, now I have $7 left…
Wow, this shocks me.
I’ve had an app that does this in the store for months called “Listen Up”. Includes 4 filters to filter out what you don’t want, let’s you turn the phone upside down to point the mic at the target, let’s your record, etc.
And, it’s certainly not $10. It’s $0.99.
Why does this get news?
I’m glad to see this article on TechCrunch. I have been looking for a decent monitoring app since the app store launched. I’ve wasted well over $10 on crappy 99 cent apps that promised this functionality and failed.
The problem with “Listen Up”, as well as the other dozens of similar apps, is that there is a 250-500 millisecond delay between the sound itself and the amplification in the app. This makes it useless; there is always an echo between the time you hear the sound with headphones and without, and it’s impossible to have a conversation like this (you are constantly talking over your voice from 500 ms ago).
Maybe the reason this app costs $10 is because it’s hard to do real-time amplification? In any case, it’s the first app I’ve tried that has successfully done it. The only problem with SoundAMP is that it’s obvious that it’s for people who need hearing assistance and not just monitoring, so it only picks up and amplifies specific frequencies. It would be nice to have an app that simply amplifies the microphone, into the headphones, in real-time.
SD: I use the ListenUp app and it is absolutely real-time and it’s multiple filter settings allow you to filter out noise. Your comment that there is any lag time is completely false.
There is no way SoundAMP can be honestly characterized as a “hearing aid”. And TC shouldn’t be helping to promote it as one. The apps TC chooses to occasionally write about are so poorly chosen I usually assume the author is friends of the developer or there’s some other connection. Even ListenUp, which is 10x the app for 1/10 the price doesn’t claim to be a hearing aid. A quick search of iTunes would have revealed this and other apps that are better, cheaper, and don’t make these claims.
Grandpa isn’t going to be seriously using his iPhone, which can’t do anything else while running this app, as a hearing aid. Hearing aids today are sophisticated, tiny devices, that are almost unnoticable. My Dad has over 70% hearing loss, which is totally compensated for by his hearing aids, which can tune into a conversation at a table in noisy restaurant or on a street surrounded by traffic. The idea that SoundAMP would replace that is a joke.
So, let’s be a little more realistic and stop jumping at every opportunity to label the iPhone a disruptor to every market. For example, the carpentry and leveling apps in the AppStore are similar in that they perform a task done existing tools/devices, and sure, they’re interesting, perhaps useful in rare settings, but I’m not going to be in my woodshop using it as a level while it gets clogged with sawdust.
If TC can’t do better research on iPhone apps it should leave the reviews of them to blogs that are dedicated to it.
I can bash a nail into a wall with my iPhone but I’m not going to be putting the hammer industry out of business anytime soon.
If TC is going to occasionally profile iPhone apps it should do a little more research.
I own ListenUp. I just launched it again to verify. There is a lag of approximately 500ms. I tested it on my 3GS, as well as my old 3G. It’s not real-time.
There is *no* lag on SoundAmp. Unfortunately, SoundAmp has all sorts of automatic filters that it applies to the sound at all times, so there is no way to get a clear, unfiltered monitor of your own voice. But it is real-time, and the first app I’ve used that is real-time (and I’ve bought every app I could find in this space).
I would be extremely happy if ListenUp were real-time, considering it’s $0.99, I already paid for it, and is exactly the concept that fits my needs. But it is clearly not at the moment, (or there is a bug that affects both the 3G and 3GS). Hopefully an update will come someday.
I just bought listenup to test and it does have the lag mentioned on 3gs.
Question for people who’ve tried the other apps mentioned … I’d like to be able to amplify people talking while filtering out the background sounds of fans and air conditioning. Sometimes the voices are at about the same volume of the AC. which of these would be best for that application? I’ve been fiddling with listenup but can’t really come up with a good setting of the filters that does this.
SD, have you tried Amplitude or iHearClear yet? We optimized the app specifically to eliminate any lag time in the amplified playback. In our tests there was no noticeable lag.
I am curious to hear about your experience. Admittedly, since it was released in March we have not tested the performance on a 3Gs. Let me know what you think.
There is a very, very small amount of lag in iHearClear which causes a sort of “vibration” (hard to explain the effect, actually) between your real voice and the recording. I’d guess it’s around 20-50ms. Is there any way to reduce it even further in an update? In any case, it’s much better than ListenUp. SoundAmp might have the same lag, but it’s hard to tell because it filters out so many frequencies that you are not hearing your full voice anyway.
lol, I feel like I’m seeing developers go at it on the interwebs. I’ve played with both apps, ListenUp for sure, FOR SURE, has extremely noticeable lag. If you want to go spend $0.99 have at it and verify on your own.
SoundAmp does a pretty decent job of eliminating lag.
Ok, message heard. There’s and update pending for Listen Up submitted on Sunday. It completely removes the delay by using direct to device calls using RemoteIO.
It also now compresses the recorded audio and I’ve added in app email to mail your recordings out.
We’ll see how long the approval takes as Apple’s being bombarded with 3.0 updates.
It is not a real hearing aid therefor $10 is too much for this kind of app.
If you look at my blog post someone in comments has created a glucose add on that will be coming out soon. http://fingerpr...-glucose-meter/
Oh the irony. An app for the iPhone to make it into a hearing aid, when Apple refuses to make the iPhone compatible with normal hearing aids by taking advantage of an exemption in the FCC rules. Blackberry, HTC, Nokia, etc all have to provide models that work with hearing aids. http://www.acce...org/hearingaid/
Totally agree, BigEdAtl. Most device OEM’s fly under the radar by claiming to be a low volume or non-main stream producer. Apple might have been able to claim this with the 1st gen iPhone but it’s hard to make that case since the 3G model was released a year ago. Let’s hope they come around.
Until then, I’m happy to sell iHearClear (http://bit.ly/Mv3Jk) for $0.99 to anyone needing a little volume boost.
Great post, Jason. Did you know that the winner of this year’s $10,000 DiabetesMine Design Challenge actually goes one better than a glucose monitor with iPhone support — rather they’ve turned the iPhone itself into the controller (main unit) for a combined glucose monitor and insulin pump.
The design is called LifeCase / LifeApp. Check it out:
http://www.diab...ife-device.html
and on YouTube:
http://www.yout...h?v=fg-yqfknE08
Thoughts from the TechCrunch community?
I think this is the beginning of the boom expected in the consumer health device industry, http://bit.ly/tsPn9.
I don’t have an iPhone (shocking I know), but I gave a friend of mine $10 bucks to buy it so I could try it out.
I have a pair of Siemens Pure aids (cost a bit north of $7K), and I wouldn’t trade them for this app
But it does a good job of amplifying. But if you’ve got more than one person talking (i.e. a meeting), you’d be “overwhelmed” pretty quickly. I had just two people talking, and it was hard to concentrate on just one person.
Like the article says, if you’ve got real hearing problems – do yourself a favor and invest in real hearing aids.
Incidentally, MagTown Tech and Gripwire released this exact same application back in March. It’s called iHearClear and we priced it at only $0.99.
iTunes Link: http://bit.ly/tBCpo
Website: http://www.ihearclear.net
We originally created the iHearClear app for people who aren’t ready for a hearing aid but still can use a little hearing boost from time to time.
After releasing iHearClear, we began to get reports back from users about new ways they were using the application — from entertainment / novelty purposes (like using it as a spy tool for surveillance) to science experiments (like listening to a dog’s heartbeat or the hum of a light bulb). We also heard stories of users attaching plastic cups and Tupperware bowls to the bottom of their iPhones to focus the sound input and boost the performance of the app.
So in response to these reports, we re-spun the app with new graphics and a UI geared to appeal to a younger audience. The latest version is called Amplitude.
iTunes Link: http://bit.ly/w3IkG
Website: http://www.AmplitudeApp.com
We have been asking users to send us their stories and videos of how they are using Amplitude. We plan to post the most interesting ones on our YouTube channel and on http://www.AmplitudeApp.com.
Hearing aides are not only about loudness, but clarity – filtering out noise, amplifying speech ..etc. I doubt this app does that.
nice idea but as a deaf person i can tell you that we do not need an application that amplify sounds we have a hearing aid for this. we need the phone to work with the hearing aid, some of them do some of them (including iphone) don’t.
I wouldn’t trade them for this app
funny, I had a walkman in 1985 that could do that.
I just tried iHearclear and Amplitude….they are great, and I don’t hear a lag at all. If there is one, it is so short as to be inaudible, and certainly not an issue, as far as I can tell.
Now if iPhone could make the phone hearing aid compatible, someone with a hearing aid like mine can be able to turn on the t-switch and put the phone next to my ear and hear perfectly without getting the electromagnetic interference of the device. So many other phones offer this capability, yet iPhone lacks this. I so much want an iPhone but can’t use it. An item to put on the wish list!
iPhone is great. There is no telling where they will stop! They have taken the phone into another dimension.
People like Mark and others like me that use t-coil equipped hearing aids should go to http://www.clearsounds.com and purchase the ClearSounds CLA7BT Bluetooth Amplified Neckloop. For people with a hearing loss this is a fantastic benefit. You get to hear amplified sound thru your hearing aids into BOTH ears. Speech discrimination can be improved by up to 80% by using both ears. I have a hearing loss, own an iPhone and use binaural t-coil hearing aids. I am now in sound heaven. I literally go to sleep with my CLA7BT Bluetooth neckloop on because I also use it to listen to my TV. The iPhone is great and has great options but there are accessories that make it far better in specific situations. The ClearSounds neckloops are one of those accessories. Using this neckloop as its accessibility for HA users would be and excellenct solution for Apple. A far better solution for Apple than spending the money on trying to make the iPhone HAC. I cannot hold my iPhone to my ear when driving anyhow; it’s against our local laws.
We seriously do applaud all the developers of these apps and accessories because they bring attention to the need for people to deal with their hearing loss. For people with minimal to mild loss, these apps will help and are far better than nothing. For moderate to severe losses, hearing aids and accessories like the ClearSounds products are the ideal solutions. You get the best of all worlds. I and many others like me are sooooo happy to be hearing on the cell phone again that we cannot say enough to thank all the people involved who help improve opportunities to hear better.
PLEASE, DO NOT TAKE YOUR HEARING FOR GRANTED! Protect your hearing at all costs – once it is gone it’s gone and you enter the assistive device world.
Roger Andrews
Exec Director
Americans for Better Hearing Foundation