- In this video, I'm reviewing the Eargo
Neo hearing aid, coming up. (upbeat bass music) Hi Guys, Cliff Olson, Doctor of Audiology and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona, and on this channel, I cover a bunch of
hearing-related information to help make you a
better informed consumer. So if you're into that, make sure you hit that Subscribe button and don't forget to click the bell to receive a notification
every time I post a new video. At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2019, online hearing aid retailer Eargo released their Neo hearing aid, which is their newest rechargeable, invisible-in-the-canal hearing aid for mild to moderate
high-frequency hearing losses. In fact, as of right now, Eargo is the only company
with a rechargeable invisible-in-the-canal
hearing aid on the market. Now I will have a link to these devices in the description of this video just in case you like what
you see in this review. That being said, let's go ahead and get into the review of the Eargo Neo Several aspects of the Eargo Neo devices have been improved upon significantly over the previous generations of Eargo Plus and the Eargo Max devices, and one of the biggest
improvements is the form factor. And it all starts with the Flexi Palms. You can see the difference between The old Flexi Fibers on the
previous generation of devices and the Flexi-Palms on the Neo devices. In my opinion, the new Flexi Palms are significantly more comfortable than the Flexi Fibers from
those previous versions. And they are starting to feel
just about as comfortable as a custom molded
invisible-in-the-canal hearing aid. The build quality is substantially better and they made the battery contacts flush with the rest of the
body of the hearing aid. This makes cleaning much easier and it reduces the issue
of having grime build up inside of the battery contact recesses. This is an issue that users had with the previous generation of devices. The body of the hearing aid
is also more cylindrical which I find to be more
comfortable inside of my ear, and they also added extra microphone ports to prevent the microphones
from getting clogged so easily. Now let me go ahead give
you a close up of the Neos. You can see the Flexi Palms
on the end of this device and you can see the ear
indicator telling you that this is for my left ear. You can see that sleek design of the body of the hearing aid and you can also see that those
battery contacts are flush with the rest of the hearing aid as well. On the backhand side, that's where you'll find
the six microphone ports and what I'm holding onto is
the actual removal string. Now I also use that removal string to put it inside of my ear, so I'm gonna go ahead and
show you how I do that. I just kinda start it
off by pushing it in. I pull my ear back a little
bit to open up my ear canal and then I slide it in
the rest of the way. They did a really good job of designing this in a black color because when you look inside
of someone's ear canal, all you see is a black opening. So when you make the device black, it blends in with that really well and then you can't even really see that removal string in there as well, and I can easily remove this device outside of my ear using
that removal string, it's very simple to do. Now one of the nice
aspects of the Neo design is that they don't cause
the occlusion effect. The occlusion effect is what occurs when you plug your ears up with something and since these Flexi
Palms suspend this device in the center of your ear canal, you never get that occlusion effect, which gives you the perception that your voice is boomy
and loud to yourself. It's very similar to a
traditional open-fit hearing aid that eliminates occlusion. Now the first charger that I received from Eargo for the review actually had some issues
with the battery contacts. I had to wiggle the devices
around in there a lot just to make sure that they
could actually get a charge. And then about halfway through my review, one of the hearing aids
ended up malfunctioning, so I had to call customer
support for Eargo which is actually one
of their strong points. They were able to get me another charger and another device right away. One of the other new features
is the smartphone app. The app gives you easy access
to frequently asked questions, how-to videos, user guides, and the Eargo store, among other things. It also lets you remove up
to three volume programs so any programs that you do not wanna use won't get in the way. You can also contact customer support via email or by phone from the app itself. It's important to understand that the app only
connects with the charger. So it's not like you can go into the app and make some settings adjustments inside of your hearing aids
while you're wearing them, and you can't stream audio directly from your phone into these hearing aids. What the app does allow for is for you to toggle on and off the
different program settings. Now those programs 1 through 4 are basically volume programs. So 1 is the lowest volume level and 4 is the highest volume level. Now the app doesn't really
do a whole lot in terms of manipulating the program
settings on your devices. But this is where Eargo
Customer Support comes in. They can actually send you over
some preset program settings that you can use in those
different program slots. These programs include a Mute program, a Flat Response program,
a Noise Reduction program, and a Feedback Reduction program. Basically, if you have
your charger connected via Bluetooth to your phone, Eargo Customer Service
can send the new programs to the charger which will
upload into the Neo devices. I was able to have them
take the volume settings from Program 4 and move them to Program 1, then we put the Flat Response program into the number two slot, the Noise Reduction program
into the number three slot, and the Feedback Reduction program into the number four slot. And just like that, in a
matter of less than a minute, the settings have been
uploaded into my Neo devices. Like I mentioned before, you can also remove
programs from your devices and this is helpful
because if you're the type of person who only uses two programs, you don't have to cycle all
the way through to number 4 and then come back to number 1. And on top of that, you basically have to smack your ear to change programs. So you'll have to less of this to actually cycle through your programs. Now it's important to understand that Eargo does not have the ability to customize your program settings. So it's not like you
can take an audiogram, send it into Eargo, have them make custom program settings for your devices, and then send them to you,
that's not how it works. They basically have standard
amplification settings in the devices that
they're using for everybody no matter what type of
hearing loss that you have and then it's on you to actually shift through the volume settings on that to see how close you can get to a beneficial amount of amplification. Now I wanted to objectively measure just how well a non-customized
Eargo Neo device would come to a mild to moderate high-frequency hearing loss prescription inside of my ears using real ear measurement. For whatever reason,
Eargo engineers decided to use a linear hearing loss prescription, which is not a common
prescription that we see nowadays and I don't even have the
equipment that can measure a specific linear hearing
loss prescription. So what I'm gonna use is I'm gonna use a nonlinear hearing loss prescription, the NAL-NL2, which is the gold standard for adult hearing aid fittings and I'm only going to
measure a 65 dB SPL input. I've entered in a mild hearing loss for my right ear, and to be conservative, a moderate hearing loss for my left ear. Then I created the NAL-NL2 prescription for these losses so I can measure to see how well the Neos match this prescription. In order to perform real ear measurement, we must insert a probe
microphone into an ear canal along with a hearing aid. We then play sound from a speaker in front of the individual, and measure the amount
of amplification given to that sound by a hearing aid inside of an individual's ear canal. What you're looking at here is my mild hearing loss prescription. The hash mark line indicates how much amplification is required to properly amplify for
this level of hearing loss. The solid black line
that you see is the sound that is coming out of the
speaker in front of me, and the solid pink line is what we call the Real Ear
Unaided Response, or REUR, which is the measurement
of that speaker sound inside of my ear canal
without a hearing aid. Any increase in the measurements that you see above the solid pink line throughout the course of these
measurements is the amount of amplification provided
by the hearing aid. With the Neo hearing aids in my ear, we need to measure the
amount of amplification given by Program 1, as indicated
by the solid purple line. The prescription hash mark
line will change in color with each program setting, but will be in the same
place for each measurement. Now I ran these measurements for each of the four program settings,
Program 2 is in red, Program 3 is in turquoise,
and Program 4 is in green. What we want to see is
the solid line overlapping with the hash mark line
as closely as possible. There are areas that it over
amplifies and under amplifies depending on which program
setting I have it on. We can see that they
provide a sizeable amount of amplification between
1500 and 2000 hertz and hit prescriptive targets
out to 2000 hertz by Program 2. But we don't hit the
high-frequency targets until we turn it to Program 4, which is indicated by the green line, and by that time, we are significantly over amplifying the mid-frequency range, which can lead to reduced speech clarity by masking over high-frequency sounds. Let's take a look and see
how well the Neos match a moderate hearing loss in my left ear. Again, the Neos are not customizable beyond increasing the volume between Programs 1, 2, 3, and 4. As you can see here, we do
not meet the prescription for a moderate hearing
loss in my left ear, and therefore we would
definitely not be able to provide enough amplification if I had a moderately severe hearing loss in my Left ear as well. Additionally, the Neo
devices are not capable of providing any low-frequency benefit because the Flexi Palms
allow for too much leakage of low-frequency amplification. I also took a measurement with
the Eargo Max hearing aids in Program 4 for comparison to see how much amplification
differences there are between these devices at Program 4. The green curve is the
Neo device at Program 4 and the purple line is now
the max device at Program 4. For a moderate hearing loss, you can see that the max
device does come closer to the hearing loss prescription, and for a mild hearing loss,
the curves are pretty similar. For an additional comparison, I also took a measurement
using a custom programmable invisible-in-the-canal hearing aid, now indicated by the turquoise solid line, to give you perspective of
what an ideal mild to moderate NAL-NL2 prescriptive match is. You can see that we match the
prescriptive hash mark lines almost exactly out to 6,000 hertz. Now it's important to note that just because you won't match your hearing loss prescription exactly, it doesn't mean that you can't receive some significant benefit
from these devices. Real ear measurement just ensures that you're receiving the
maximum amount of benefit from whatever devices you decide to wear. I also wanted to show you
the real ear measurement of these new program settings that I had Eargo Customer
Support upload into my devices. First, I tested the Flat Response. The purple curve indicates
the amplification while in Program 4, which is
the maximum volume program. The red curve indicates what
happens to the amplification when we switch into the Flat
Response version of Program 4. You can see it takes down the
high frequencies a little bit and boosts up the mid frequencies. The response is definitely
a little flatter, but not by a lot. Second, I tested the
Noise Reduction program. You can see the response curve
is very similar to Program 4, which is what we would expect to see when testing speech in quiet. But I also tested the devices in noise to measure the difference
in noise reduction between Program 4 and the
Noise Reduction program. The first measurement
that I ran is the amount of noise reduction that
we see in Program 4. The purple curve indicates
the standard amount of amplification before
noise reduction kicks in. You can see how over time, the red curve falls away
from the purple curve, indicating how much noise reduction is occurring in this program. Then I switched to the
Noise Reduction program and ran the measurement again. The turquoise curve from
this Noise Reduction program does start out a little
below the purple curve, which was from Program 4, but what we care about
is the overall difference in the turquoise curve and the green curve which indicates the amount of noise reduction in
this particular program. You can see that the green curve from the Noise Reduction
program is ultimately lower than the red curve from the
standard program number 4, meaning that the Noise Reduction program did reduce noise more than Program 4, and the average difference is by about two to three decibels. Last, I tested the Feedback
Suppression program. Feedback, or whistling, typically occurs at around 3,000 hertz because of the natural ear canal
resonance of the human ear, which I'll have to get
into in another video. What we can see, as
indicated by the pink curve, is that this program reduces the amount of amplification at around 3,000 hertz to reduce the likelihood
of feedback occurring. But it could also negatively
impact speech understanding, because you are actually
taking away from some of the amplification in the speech range. However, without the ability to control how much sound leaks out of your ear canal due to the Flexi-Plams,
there aren't a lot of options other than using notching,
like Eargo is doing here, or using phase inversion
to cancel out the feedback. At the end of the day, the Eargo
Neos are definitely capable of providing you with some
beneficial amplification, and the new programs that they
have put into these devices, or at least made available
for these devices, can give you some
additional benefit as well. The last thing I want to cover
is the cost of these devices. Eargo Neo devices come in a set of two, which means that you have
to purchase two of them at one time. Now if you're an individual who only has hearing loss in one ear, then you really should be going in to get a hearing evaluation first because that could be a sign of a more serious medical condition. That being said, the cost of
two devices is 2750, or $2,750. Now the link that I
have in the description as of right now has a $200 savings, so you can actually grab
yourself a set for $2550. They do come with a one-year warranty that you can with a fee
extend for another year and one of the nice features
inside of the warranty is the Advanced Replacement program. So if you happen to have a device that stops working for
you, you contact Eargo, they will send you a new device right away so you can get that
device back in your ear and then you can send back the
device that stopped working. The other nice thing that Eargo has is their upgrade discount program. So if they come out with a new device that you just have to have, you
can send in your old devices and get a discount on the newer ones, and Eargo comes out with new
devices about every year. Eargo is also one of the very few reputable online hearing
aid manufacturers out there. So if you are going to be
buying hearing aids online to treat your hearing loss, you might wanna give the Eargo Neo a try. That's it for this video,
if you have any questions, leave them in the Comments section below. If you like the video, please share it and if you wanna see other
videos just like this one, go ahead and hit that Subscribe button. I'll see you next time. (light bright music)
