“I’ve tried different brands of hearing aids and they’re good, but not that good,” Martin says in a Zoom interview. He visited the team in Soho, conducted a street test, and was delighted to try it with his wife and daughter at their favorite restaurant, where de Jonge sat a few tables away with a laptop. But the tie-breaker for Martin was the cocktail party.
“I was here in our building, at a party upstairs, and I had my old hearing aids in my ears,” he says. “I was sitting and talking to four people and I realized I didn’t understand any of them, so I go, wait, I have these new hearing aids. I went downstairs, put them on, came back and heard everyone. ” Now he wears them all the time and has even joked about wearing hearing aids Saturday Night Live50th anniversary special program. “I don’t really think about how it used to be,” he says. “I used to be afraid to go to restaurants, but not anymore.” His friend Balaban, once he gets into the beta test, is similarly smitten. “This is a significant improvement over the ridiculously expensive devices I was using,” Balaban says.
Other machers are not publicly available, but de Jonge assures me that they are mostly named in bold. Since there are only a few dozen beta units, this means that some influential people have been moved to the waiting list. Balaban’s wife, Lynn Grossman, recalls attending a Labor Day dinner attended by more than 100 people, generally of a certain age, in a private room at the restaurant, thinking that her husband and another guy – a celebrated fashion CEO – were the only ones who had heard about Fortell. “I think Bob received 12 or 14 emails asking, ‘How do I get these hearing aids?’”
Once the product is launched, Fortell will sell hearing aids at a single clinic on Park Avenue in Manhattan. It’s decorated like an elegant living room, with devices displayed in a tasteful presentation straight out of Apple’s retail playbook. A silicon wafer with custom-made circuitry hangs on the wall. In the early stages, his team of four audiologists will only serve a few dozen clients a week to make sure everything is on track. In any case, as production increases, supply will be constrained.
This is great for Fortell, but it seems that de Jonge’s initial impulse to bring all the grandparents into the land of interrogation may be constrained to the one percent, which doesn’t quite qualify him for the Salk Medal. When I ask de Jonge how his invention could change the lives of the masses, his answers, whether due to the secrecy of his future plans or simply the lack of a good answer, seem uncertain. In its defense, Fortell resisted the temptation to boost the customary price of premium hearing aids – $6,800 is actually slightly less than other doctor-prescribed hearing aids. (As with other high-end hearing aids, the price is part of a package that includes fitting and support from professional audiologists.) However, even this reasonable price limits adoption; it’s a depressed fact that some Medicare plans and many health insurance plans do not cover hearing aids, a policy that condemns millions of people to auditory barrenness, conversational exclusion, isolating them from loved ones and accelerating dementia.
It’s unclear whether Fortell’s technology will find employ in the cheaper over-the-counter hearing aids currently available, made possible by a Biden-era regulatory change. These include Apple AirPods Pro 2 devices and products from other consumer electronics brands that are widely known to lend a hand people with hearing loss, but not as much as high-end devices that come with professional service. Fortell’s proposition requires thorough testing and tuning, which will continue over time as users become accustomed to the devices. In any case, a white-glove approach will consume Fortell’s efforts for the coming year and beyond. Expansion will occur by opening clinics in a few selected cities, and only then will Fortell consider scaling up to allow others to sell the technology.