Olive Devices Offers FreeBell: Innovative—and Affordable—Hearing Aids

Come across the Disruptor: Olive Devices

A recent Philadelphia University graduate is set to launch a hearing aid that is not just technologically revolutionary—information technology will also be affordable

Feb. 23, 2017

What were you doing after yous graduated college? How many of you were puttering around and working on loftier-stop visual art projects while working part fourth dimension at the Dairy Queen virtually the freeway, or attempting to get a Disk business off the ground? No one could really blame you—that post-higher grace period is similar a written report hall from life. But 23-yr-old Renee Kakareka had no time for such a grace menses. She was too busy trying to change the world.

Within a month of graduating from college terminal summer, Kakareka had started Olive Devices, a Philadelphia-based company that's creating a device to assistance the hard of hearing operate more wholly in the world. Kakareka isn't from Philly originally; she's from Illinois, where her acumen as a softball pitcher and outfielder netted her a scholarship to Philadelphia University. Kakareka started out studying compages merely fell in love with industrial blueprint, which became her major. What entranced her, specially, was the notion of doing social expert through simple, accessible design practices.

"I knew that I wanted to create some kind of change in the globe through the design skills that I had," says Kakareka. "My sophomore twelvemonth, we did activities where nosotros researched certain aspects of design and presented them to the form. I did my presentation on IDEO'southward social affect design; a classmate did a presentation on designing for disabilities. After that, my professor gave me a book called Design Meets Inability, and I kind of got hooked."

Olive Devices plans to debut the FreeBell for betwixt $300 and $500, a pittance for a Swiss Army Pocketknife device in an expensive and constricted market. This, Williams says, could easily disrupt the brackish hearing assistance market.

Kakareka created dissimilar product ideas for a client she worked for as a higher inferior, including some pitches to assistance fight insomnia and remainder issues; when she realized that her customer, who suffered from a number of other physical issues related to Charcot Marie molar affliction, was also hard-of-hearing, she began to develop the thought for FreeBell—a unproblematic, wearable device to aid difficult of hearing folks identify where sound is coming from, and the severity of that sound, through vibrations.

The notion didn't come out of left field, either: Kakareka, as a event of a grade school program, can speak American Sign Linguistic communication and has networked extensively with difficult of hearing people. "When I was in second grade, we started learning sign language. They were incorporating difficult of hearing kids into our classroom, and I was really pretty good friends with a couple of the girls in the class," Kakareka says. "They taught us sign language through sixth course. My friends and I kind of used it every bit our cloak-and-dagger linguistic communication."

Being so deeply involved with the deaf and hard of hearing, says Kakareka, has given her a special window into their lives, and the power to understand what they're looking for in devices that can assistance them get through the day more than easily. FreeBell looks similar a pair of those across-the-neck headphones—similar a Samsung Level U—but without the actual speaker component. Instead, the FreeBell sits on the neck, and vibrates with alternating levels of urgency when sounds are present. For case, if you're in a classroom and someone to your right is quietly asking to borrow your pen, FreeBell will buzz, lightly, on the right side of your neck; if someone to your left is yelling at you to get out of the style of a rampaging balderdash on the streets of Pamplona, FreeBell volition buzz on your left side considerably more urgently.

Kakareka plans to also equip FreeBell with speech communication-to-text technology that will exist connected to a smartphone app, then users can chart the conversations they've had over the class of the twenty-four hours, or engage in them in real fourth dimension, through a sort of closed captioning service. It's an ambitious concept, no dubiousness, and one that's going to take time to develop. Olive Devices' offset test of the FreeBell device, after nearly a year of evolution, is going to be in the kickoff or second week of March.

"In that location are products that do captioning, and some practise sound localization," says Kakareka. "But none, aside from FreeBell, practise captioning and audio localization."

Nancy Williams, a hearing advocate who is difficult of hearing herself, will be setting up the test runs. Williams, who runs her ain hearing advisory group called Auditory Insight, says that she was impressed by Kakareka's idea after Kakareka asked her to write a guest blog last twelvemonth; she at present advises the fledgling company. Williams says users who accept other common hearing assistance devices, similar the cochlear implant, oft have difficulty pinpointing the distance and location from which sounds are being fabricated. With FreeBell, that issue is resolved.

"What separates what Renee is working on from others is then interesting," says Williams. "She's stretching the definition of the form that amplification takes."

Kakareka says Olive Devices has so far been funded through individual sources, such as venture capital firm BioAdvance; it has also won or placed in several tech and business competitions.

Kakareka doesn't only want to create some other hearing help. She wants to make certain it's affordable, even for hard of hearing people who are underprivileged. Williams, who uses a hearing assist herself, says that the hearing aid industry is both too expensive and likewise monolithic. Currently, even a uncomplicated hearing aid can cost a buyer more than $ii,400, (even though, Williams says, it is fabricated upwards of parts that toll about $100). And if you lot're looking for a live captioning device, your options are slim—nigh are desk phones that interpret phone calls, which will set you dorsum north of $seventy.

"There's something like vi companies that make mainstream hearing aids, and they command 98 percent of the market," Williams says, calculation that with such market dominance, companies tin can hands inflate prices.

Olive Devices, on the other hand, plans to debut the FreeBell for between $300 and $500, a pittance for a Swiss Army Knife device in an expensive and constricted market. This, Williams says, could easily disrupt the stagnant hearing aid market.

"In that location are products that do captioning, and some do audio localization," says Kakareka. "But none, aside from FreeBell, practice captioning and sound localization."

"Something like 360 million people are either deaf or hard of hearing," says Kakareka. "And simply 10 percent of them are in loftier income areas. We're trying to create a model that appeals to high income and depression income areas."

There's been a pretty steep learning bend for Kakareka. She admits that she may accept bitten off a piffling more she could chew early in her company's development. She was, functionally, working alone final year, and says that she overextended herself. An alpha personality to begin with—that whole playing two positions in softball and being a 23-year-one-time company founder matter may have clued you in—Kakareka was skeptical at first well-nigh drafting too large a workgroup for her product. Simply she has since put together a team, based out of Philadelphia, to help her in the development, design and marketing of the FreeBell.

"It's been a really dandy learning process," says Kakareka. It's still an uphill climb for Olive Devices, every bit it is for any startup. But with Kakareka'south ambition and clarity of vision when it comes to creating the FreeBell, I wouldn't bet against her.

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/olive-devices-renee-kakareka-freebell/