CUSTOM HEARING INSTRUMENTS BY COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): More than 28 million Americans suffer from some type of hearing impairment, according to the statistics from National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders (NIDCD). It is estimated that over 260 million people are hearing impaired worldwide. Fortunately, many of these people can benefit from the use of a hearing aid. However, hearing aids cannot work for everyone. Those who can be helped need to be carefully fitted. Current manufacturing process of custom-fit shells of hearing aids is highly labor-intensive manual process. Each shell has to be made by skilled technicians using manual operations. The quality and consistency of the fitting vary significantly with technician's skill level. A typical process of producing a shell takes about 40 minutes from start to finish. Major drawbacks of manual process include: Shortage of skilled worker and long training time, Product variances - lack of consistency of quality, Slow in production and not scalable for mass production, and High level of remake and return of products. The primary objective of this SBIR effort is to investigate the feasibility of an automatic shell manufacturing (ASM) process for custom-fit hearing aids based on a novel 3D camera technology invented by Genex Technologies, Inc (GENEX). We propose to develop a low-cost high precision 3D camera that is able to acquire the 3D digital models of ear impression and incorporate the customer-specific 3D data into shell design software. The computer-aided-design of the shell is then sent to a rapid prototyping machine to build the custom-made shell directly. Phase 1 project will focus on developing the turnkey, ultra low-cost 3D camera technology, interface with CAD design software, and streamlining the Rapid Prototyping technique for fabricating shell pieces. A prototype of 3D camera system will be demonstrated to acquire ear impression model that can be used to produce customer shell pieces.