Assisted hearing, via an app

An Indian company, Quadio Devices, has launched Q+, an app that can help people with moderate to severe hearing loss to hear better without a traditional hearing-aid.

Quadio is a Pune-based startup which develops, manufactures and markets hearing devices. The launch comes after 18 months of research, and it is the first of its kind in India, the company claims, and can be scaled up across the globe. It is available on Android and iOS platforms, and will be free for the first two months. From mid-July, the company will charge Rs 500 per download, but will keep a completely free version for the economically weaker sections of society.

How it works

The app needs to be used along with the phone headset. Sound comes in via the headset’s or the phone’s microphone. The app uses the phone’s computing power to process the audio signal, and, via its advanced algorithms, it then delivers, via the earphones, a quality of sound at the optimum level for comprehension and comfort. It applies suitable amplification factors to different frequencies based on the hearing loss, and uses gain control to ensure that the output is not as loud as to damage hearing further. It also reduces noise from the input signal, while leaving speech unaffected, which us helpful in noisy environments.

A mission

Quadio’s founder, Paresh Patel, lives with hearing loss himself. Mr Patel was a 26-year-old IIT graduate pursuing higher studies in the US when his disability began to make its presence felt. Now 63, he is determined to bridge the gap for what he described to

The Hindu as “millions of people [who] are suffering due to lack of access to hearing care and the huge costs associated with the hearing aids.”

Anurag Sharma, co-Founder and CTO, Quadio, said, “When we started Quadio in 2009, the objective was to come up with hearing solution that empowered people to hear what they wanted, how they wanted and whenever they wanted. The flexibility of controls offered by a smartphone app is much more than that is offered by conventional hearing aids and along with the affordability of smartphones, the reach of app store and the inbuilt test, this gets us closer to achieving our objective.”