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Australians buying the new AirPods Pro earbuds will soon discover something nifty — they double as hearing aids.
The software that turns the earphones into a clinical-grade hearing aid has already been approved by the US regulator, with Australia’s expected to follow soon. Yet the regulatory green light only formalises a trend that has been underway for some time.
People have been using AirPods Pro as hearing aids for “a very long time, years,” said Kevin Franck, chief clinical officer of Otolith Labs, a startup designing a wearable to cure vertigo, and former head of audiology at Harvard Medical School.
Apps like Mimi have been used to provide hearing tests, Franck explained, and the AirPods Pro’s noise cancelling can be manipulated to offer wide dynamic range compression — a function hearing aids use to assist those with mild hearing loss.
