Auditory Revolution: The Trailblazing Journey of EarGym's Founders

Amanda Philpott, the co-founder and CEO of eargym, joined us on The Hearing Matters Podcast!She discussed the origin of eargym and her passion for improving population health. 

Eargym is a step-by-step hearing care platform that aims to address the lack of awareness and fear surrounding hearing loss. The platform offers affordable and accessible solutions, including auditory training games, hearing checks, and advice and guidance. 

Eargym has received research grant funding and has partnered with organizations such as the Alzheimer's Society to further their mission of improving hearing health and preventing cognitive decline. The app has already gained over 260,000 users and is focused on continuous improvement based on user feedback. 

The future plans for eargym include expanding research into auditory processing disorders and pursuing medical device approval. Amanda encourages listeners to try out eargym and provide feedback to help improve the product.

Transcript

Blaise Delfino:

You are tuned into The Hearing Matters Podcast, the show that discusses hearing technology, best practices and a growing national epidemic, hearing loss. Before we kick this episode off, a special thank you to our partners, Sycle, built for the entire hearing care practice; Redux, faster, drier, smarter, verified; OtoSet, the modern ear cleaning device. Welcome back to another episode of The Hearing Matters Podcast. I'm your host, Blaise Delfino, and joining us today is Amanda Philpott. She is the co-founder and CEO of eargym. Amanda, welcome to The Hearing Matters Podcast.

Amanda Philpott:

Hi, Blaise, and thank you very much for having us on. It's a pleasure to be here.

Blaise Delfino:

We are so grateful to have you on the show. As we were talking before we hit record, Amanda, I've known about eargym for a couple of years now. I'm familiar with your origin story, but your team has some pretty exciting stuff, for lack of a better term, going on in the hearing healthcare space, especially in the UK. So share your story. How did you become involved with eargym? You have quite an extensive background, not only in innovation but holding leadership roles. So where does all this passion from hearing healthcare come from?

Amanda Philpott:

Yeah, great. So I built eargym with my co-founder, Andy Shanks, he's a retired DJ, from participating in an incubator, so that was the Zinc incubator. Their mission at the time was to build businesses that could improve the quality of later life for 100 million older people. The reason that I ended up on this incubator, and I was in my early 50s at the time, is that I'm driven by the ambition to improve population health. For the previous nearly 30 years I was in the NHS, the English NHS, and I'd worked my way up and worked in hospitals and community units and everything else. I was the chief exec of Population Health Commissioning Organization in the NHS, which I loved. But the financial pressures and the political pressures is such that you end up focusing on end-year financial balance rather than investing in prevention of ill health, and that's where my first love is.

So the UK government was running something called the Industrial Challenge, which bringing together academia and public service and small industry to build solutions for the future. I thought, "That looks like something that I would really like to do." So I applied for the Zinc accelerator, got on to it, very luckily, learned a huge amount about how to build a startup, and in the process realized that I really hadn't recognized the challenge of hearing loss, either its prevalence or its correlation with our cognitive function. I thought, "That is something that is I really want to have a go at." Luckily, Andy in the same cohort as me when we were messing about with hearing checks, we realized that both of us have moderate hearing loss, and we joined together to have a go at it. Andy is a retired DJ and a digital product specialist. Turned out we've both got moderate hearing loss. Actually, my father died just two months ago.

Blaise Delfino:

Oh, I'm sorry.

Amanda Philpott:

... with dementia. Thank you. But it means we both bring personal experience not only of hearing loss but also of the consequences. Well, you might challenge me and say I can't prove that my dad's dementia was related to his hearing loss, but he did have unaddressed hearing loss for two or three decades before his passing. So I think we bring some personal insights into a much bigger field that experts such as yourself contribute to.

Blaise Delfino:

Have that personal experience when you do live or know someone close who presents with hearing loss or who presents with cognitive decline, it really does hit home, especially when you are running an organization and a business like yourself. Because when you are spreading awareness of your mission of what eargym is, that allows you to really resonate with your current and future customers. What I like most about eargym is this advocacy aspect. If we backtrack to the incubator, so I also have experience in the incubation space, if you will, in Innovation Center. How amazing is that platform because you have a building just full of entrepreneurs and think tanks? That must've been such an exciting time when you were gearing up and talking about what can eargym do? How can eargym help individuals? Because with hearing healthcare really booming in the UK, this is an exciting time for you and your team.

Amanda Philpott:

Yeah, that's right. Being in an incubator is great because it opens up doors to all kinds of people that you might not have access to. So what Zinc did was, for example, we gained advisors who are real hearing experts like Lorenzo Picinali at Imperial at the Dyson Design School of Engineering is an audio and acoustic expert, and Maria Chat at the Chat Lab at UCL Ear Institute and Mahmood Bhutta, who's an ENT surgeon locally. We have a superb board of about 10 advisors. I think that had we not had the credibility of the incubator behind us, two things: One, I wouldn't have had the encouragement to go out and find more from those experts and to knock on those doors, but also they saw that we were really serious about the size and scale of the challenge that we were trying to address.

It was a great support. Then also, as you have experienced yourself, you're in these large open plan places and you get to try things with a captive audience who are all in the space of giving you really useful feedback about what they feel, what they think, how they might go about it, what their impressions are. So you get really quick feedback on any ideas. When we were starting to think what would interest people in thinking about their hearing, we even got support from Audible to record some immersive auditory training, some short stories just so that we could test people enjoyability of immersive auditory training in the first place before we started developing any kind of product.

Blaise Delfino:

I love that word test because it goes back to that minimum viable product. How important is it, Amanda, again, I'm preaching to the choir here, but how important an MVP, a minimum viable product is when you are bringing a new service and/or product to market? Testing is so important. So share with us what that testing looked like, a 10,000-foot view and then dive in, let our listeners know what is eargym, what problem does it solve, and who is it for?

Amanda Philpott:

Yeah, so let me start at the end if you like and then work backwards if that's okay. So eargym is a step-by-step here in CAP platform. What we were driven to design was something we found when we were looking at the problem that the first problem is that people aren't aware of how their hearing is. So they don't know how it is compared to their own hearing 10 years ago. They don't know how it is compared to their family and friends. It's not like sight. It's not so obvious, if you like. Then we found the second problem that even when people are aware of their hearing deteriorating, they're frightened to do something about it or they're put off by the cost of hearing aids, and they perceive that hearing aids are the only solution. Now, I have to say I do think hearing aids are a great solution, but they're not for everybody and not in the earlier stages of journey of hearing loss. So cost and fear of frail in all of those things and ignorance we felt were significant problems that needed to be addressed.

So we wanted to build something that was affordable and accessible and attractive, something that's fun. So we looked to the science, we looked to research about, well, hearing aids as I've said, have a fantastic facility and a brilliant improvement for those people that access them, but what else is there? We found Whitten's work on auditory training and the lab-based potential of auditory training of an up to 25% improvement in your overall hearing capacity, which was really illuminating in terms of the importance of helping people to practice listening. So enabling the auditory processing mechanism really to get a workout and contribute to our overall hearing capacity. So taking into account all of that knowledge, we tried to build a hearing care companion that was affordable and accessible, that brought in a different solution than hearing aids and a complimentary solution.

So our early beta products, before we even got to our MVP, our minimum viable product, we tried immersive short stories. We realized, and you will know this, I think, that the cost of creating enough material with all the actors and directors and the original scripts and then the recording and everything else was prohibitive for us as a very early-stage business. So we had to get creative and then we thought, "Well, what do we look to that can inspire us?" We looked to match three games, for example, where if where people play over time and they play a lot over time, we found amazing stats for Candy Crush and other huge games. We thought that that was a real opportunity for success because what we wanted to do was build a product that would gather hearing and cognition data over time. So we decided to go down the gamification route, and our beta products were moving from storytelling into games. Then we started to think about measurement.

So what are the checks that we can include that are legitimate within an app where people might be using, well, they will be using different phones? But they might be using different hearing hardware and in-ear, over ear on all these different wired Bluetooth, all the different criteria that come to mind for having to take into account valid and reliable tests. So our beta wrap has gone through various iterations over the last, well, probably couple of years to try to get a package of experience together that is useful but is also valid and reliable. We've had research funding to bring in user-led design to make the user journey as enjoyable and as hurdle free as possible. So the MVP, we only really launched that last September, a year, last September. Even so, we have probably only become satisfied with that MVP in the last month or so because we work on a two-week design cycle where we are constantly listening to feedback and then improving.

Blaise Delfino:

It brings me back to build, measure and then learn.

Amanda Philpott:

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, you've said that so much better than I just did. Yeah.

Blaise Delfino:

No, and it's so inspiring and such a breath of fresh air, Amanda, because with these early startups and these early stage startups, your team, while you are mature, the infancy stage of this two-week cycle with this MVP, this is super exciting stuff for lack of a better term. What are you finding and how is your team pivoting with some of the information and feedback that you are getting?

Amanda Philpott:

Yeah, so you say we're mature, and we are in our chronological age, but of course, Andy and I are both new to the world of startup and equity investment and things like that. So it's really exciting professionally as well as in content. Our team, we have grown our team and shrunk our team depending on the skills that we need. So we have a games designer in-house, sound designers as well as flutter developers and things. So we've actually redesigned the onboarding process. So we've learned a lot from other apps actually about... we've learned a lot about people want to try an app before they start to think about funding it, paying for it. In our case, what we've learned is that people want to know how their hearing is, and they want to know that they have a hearing problem or a deterioration in their hearing in order to want to train. We developed a really easy frequency slider hearing check, just a little ear age check, and we don't claim that it's anything other than something to raise awareness.

We've delivered over 260,000 of those ear age checks. But what really surprised us is that about 70% of those people are people aged under 35. So what that's shown us is that people aged under 35 are starting to think about their hearing health. But at that age, they're not likely to be showing a level of hearing deterioration that would benefit from training. So we have made it easier to check your hearing and to understand how that might be impacting your life using the Amsterdam Inventory for Auditory Disability and Handicap or any other checks. Then we have the opportunity to try the training games that we have within the app, which are short, easy play games that train your hearing skills around detection, localization, discrimination and intelligibility. Then we have advice and guidance, and we have made it so that you can get two days access, all areas access if you like to get an understanding of your hearing. Then if you want to carry on training, then you can pay a relatively small annual subscription to have access to that on an ongoing basis.

Blaise Delfino:

I think that the fact that 70% were younger than 35, I do think there is an upside to that where those individuals will bring maybe the app and their results to family members maybe that they might think present with hearing loss and say, "Hey, I tried out this app, it's called eargym. Give it a try. You have a couple of days that's complimentary. You can test your hearing." So while I might be delusively optimistic at times, Amanda, that could be an upside to some of the statistics and feedback that you are getting. As you went through the different verticals within the app, if I am a new user and I download the app, what can I expect from the app? What are some features of the app that I can go through? Of course, there's listening opportunities. Share some of the features of the app and what I would walk away as a new user learning.

Amanda Philpott:

Yeah. So the first thing that would happen is that obviously we would welcome you to the app and say what the experience will be, but the first element really, is about checking your hearing and how that impacts on your life. We use the Digital Triplet Test, which is also the test that's used by the World Health Organization, so there are 27 sets of numbers in noise. We are also introducing the CCRM, so the coordinated response measurement, which we feel gives us a better indication of movement over time. So if people are using our app for a period of time, then they'll be able to measure impact a bit more clearly there. We use, obviously I've mentioned the frequency slider, but really that's awareness raising.

Then on the life impact side, we use the Amsterdam Inventory, and we use Lubbens, and we use the ONS, the Social Inclusion and Emotional Scales. We are now starting to look at those more significant cognitive assessments, but they require a little bit more care, and we're working through, we have some research grant funding from the Alzheimer's Society. So the GP or the physician-led dementia test in the UK is called the MoCA, and there's a digital version called the BoCA. We are looking to include that, but clearly we don't want people to be distressed by any diagnoses or rather screening check in the app.

So we're thinking about how to extend those in the first instance. At this point, you have the opportunity to check your hearing and to assess or understand better the impact on your life. Then we offer you four hearing training games at the moment that we have developed in-house. There's Busy Baristas, so you are a barista fulfilling coffee orders where the orders get more complex against the increasingly complex ambient sound that we have recorded binaurally. We have Odd-One-Out, which is literally the Odd-One-Out sound, which is your frequency and pitch and what have you, and Tone and Sound Seeker, which is normally finding animals in complex environments, so the ability to first detect and then discriminate sound. So we've developed games that are fun.

The one that we have measured for impact, and I guess I think you and probably previous participants in your podcast would recognize as most likely to have the greatest impact is Busy Barista where we have the speech in noise and speech against two-talker background, which we have researched the impact for. Then the third element of the is advice and guidance. So there will be some people, probably one in 10 people who are using eargym where our checks are saying, "Actually, you really would benefit from a face-to-face professional." We advise them recognizing from our user research that people are frightened of going to find professional advice. We've talked to our in-house audiologists and our board advisor GP to say, "What would you advise? What would you say to people, and what would you advise them to prepare before they go in for that face-to-face consultation?" So we provide that kind of advice.

Blaise Delfino:

I'm very excited for the future of eargym and really the impact that you're making not only in the UK but globally. The fact that you've had 260,000 users in such a short amount of time, it has to be a breath of fresh air. You and the team have to be so excited, but also proud because there's so much behind-the-scenes work, Amanda, that I'm sure has gotten into this. This investment, not only of time and capital from your team, the impact, I can tell that that's really what your team is all about. I love the fact that if a user gets to the point and they feel as though, or the app says, "You know what? You really would benefit from visiting a hearing care professional, I love that aspect as well.

I think with eargym from a hearing care professional standpoint, because stigma is really still the reason why most individuals do not seek hearing help, because hearing aids, they feel, "It's going to make me look older," "It's going to bring attention to me." Stigma is really that number one reason why individuals don't seek hearing help, so if eargym can bridge that gap, can provide them the time that they need to really go through that grieving process. Because I don't feel as though a lot of individuals understand that when a patient starts to suspect they have hearing loss, they're going to start to grieve. It's that acceptance. It's that denial. They're going through all these, it's that Kübler-Ross, I believe who coined the five stages of grief. So I'm so happy and excited to hear that eargym is solving that problem. Is there a way in which that users, if they are recommended to seek a professional, will they be able to find a provider within the app itself?

Amanda Philpott:

We haven't done that yet, but we are in discussions with High Street providers of audiology services. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Your point about grieving is a great point. I didn't realize that I have moderate hearing loss until I was developing eargym. In my previous career in the NHS, I was a chief executive, and I was super stressed. I was super stressed because of the job and the politics and everything else. But in hindsight, I am really sure that a massive contributor to my stress and unhappiness was my deafness and my undiagnosed deafness because, of course, I would be in meetings that I was chairing and tell people off for mumbling.

You know the way hierarchy works, nobody would say, "Honestly, you are the problem." So I didn't know until Jesse from the RNID stood in front of me and asked the basic questions about, "Do you think people mumble a lot? Do you find noisy places difficult? Do you not enjoy meetings? Do you have the television on too loud?" It wasn't until that point, I'm your average person, I'm perfectly competent, it didn't occur to me that the problem was mine. Strange.

Blaise Delfino:

You cannot see the picture when you're in the frame.

Amanda Philpott:

Yeah, that's a great phrase. Yeah.

Blaise Delfino:

So while I was doing my research on eargym and your career, I found on the website you talk a lot about research, which is wonderful to see, especially when you are startup phase, you're a mature company, but still in that early startup phase. But I love the fact that you do have that research and your team is involved in a lot of research. Tell us who a few of your partners are because they're pretty heavy hitters in the space, and Amanda, why are these partnerships so important, not only for the field of hearing healthcare, but for eargym as well?

Amanda Philpott:

Yes. So we are half-and-half funded between equity investment and research grant funding, and so research grant is front and center. As I said at the beginning, our driving ambition is to contribute to greater understanding between the correlation between hearing loss and dementia. So if we can't do research, we would not be succeeding as a business if we can't contribute to that research. So we are really lucky. Our very early research, we had a small grant from the Welcome Trust on conditions that are affected by stigma as we've just touched on. So what are the issues around hearing loss? What do we need to take into account in our product design that addresses the stigma of hearing loss? Then much more substantially, the UKRI Designed for Ageing Grant is a two-year grant that we've received that has enabled us to engage a user-led design panel and wider user engagement in thinking about what matters to people, to enable people to have a healthy later life or the best possible later life.

So our design panel of people aged 45 and above who are contributing, so every stage of our app development is tested in beta with our design. In fact, even in Figma, in our design stage with potential users of the product or actual users of the product. That is funded by UKRI, which is, I guess I should explain, that's a government-funded research grant funding program. Then really excitingly, we have a grant from the Alzheimer's Society, the very large charity that funds research into Alzheimer's and other dementias. Through that, we've been able to include people living with dementia in our product design. We are now as a semifinalist in the Longitude Prize on Dementia, which is really exciting.

Blaise Delfino:

Congratulations.

Amanda Philpott:

Yeah. Thank you so much. We're very excited about that. We're working hard to become a finalist hopefully, during 2024. But the work that we're doing for that is developing a dementia-friendly version of the Digital Triplets Test. So we're working out how to take the interface and headphone experience and make it usable by somebody who is living with dementia who may need the care and assistance of a carer to be able to undertake the test. The reason that we're doing that is not just to have a dementia- friendly interface, it's because of the overlap of symptoms. So sometimes people with dementia may or may not have hearing loss. Unless you know what the cause of different behaviors is, then we won't be treating the right cause.

Blaise Delfino:

There's a few things that really stuck out to me there. Number one, congratulations on these partnerships that not only springboard eargym forward, but the end user is going to benefit from all of this legwork that is happening. I was thinking November is National Caregivers Month. Again, going back to eargym, while of course, the goal is for individuals who suspect they present with hearing loss to use eargym, there's still that opportunity with some of the caregivers out there as well because caregivers, of course, might be younger than the individual who needs assistance. The aspect of being able to, from a caregiver standpoint, they're becoming educated on hearing healthcare. Really, I think what a great goal of eargym is shortening the adoption rate of hearing technology, and I think we're going to see that. But also, again, I love the mission of your organization. Speaking of which, what would you say the mission of eargym is?

Amanda Philpott:

We want to become the hearing health companion, the go-to place for learning about your hearing and making sure that you know how to prevent avoidable decline in your hearing loss, and then when you do have hearing loss supporting you with early intervention and with signposting to the right services. We are aware of the opportunity of auditory training at every life stage. So if we think about auditory processing disorder and the association with other neurodiverse conditions, we see the opportunity of auditory training, not just in dementia, but at every life stage. So we will look to enhance our ability to contribute knowledge of hearing health and support for good hearing health for life. That's our ambition.

Blaise Delfino:

I love it. I love the fact that you are raising awareness, and part of your mission is that auditory processing disorder piece in that auditory training because APD really needs to... Within the last couple of years, one of our colleagues and friends, Dr. Angela Alexander, she presented a TED Talk on APD. She is an audiologist, APD specialist, APD guru. So this would definitely most likely be music to her ears, no pun intended. Again, just the awareness aspect of it, I'm a big Andrew Huberman fan.

He runs a health podcast, but he always talks about with some of his guests, is the difference between lifespan and health span. I feel as though eargym really is part of that bucket of let's focus on health span. Let's keep your ears and your brain again, hearing loss happens between the ears. We hear with our brain to keep our brain sharp. I'm super, super thrilled and impressed with your work with the Alzheimer's Association. How did that come about? I know you have a board, your board is full of so many different thought leaders in different verticals. Did someone on the board bring that to you, or what was that relationship like and how do you expect it to continue to grow in the future?

Amanda Philpott:

Yes. I think it was in conversations with members of our advisory board that was making it so crystal clear about the critical importance of looking after our hearing for our cognitive well-being that we were really driven to make sure that we developed a product where we really understood the perspective of not only people with hearing loss, but people who were likely to be experiencing the consequences of undiagnosed hearing loss. We wanted both ends of the spectrum, if you like, the people starting to experience hearing loss and the people affected by lack of diagnosis, because we felt that that would help us to properly understand the challenges that people face and why people don't address hearing loss currently in the vast majority of cases, because we want to tip that balance.

So we went from our board advisors saying that I'm fortunate I'm reasonably well-connected from my NHS career, and I think that there is enormous value in these national and international charities, and I always have thought that. So we simply went to speak to them and they appointed us to their grant program, and we applied and fortunately, were successful in the first round. That was their first grant to us. Then they are one of the partners in the Longitude Prize. Unfortunately, because they know our work. Obviously, we applied again to the Longitude Prize, but it's part of a continuum, isn't it, when you start working with somebody? They have some more favorites, somebody, a charity, and have more faith in the work that you are doing if you are demonstrating the progress that you said that you would make.

Blaise Delfino:

For sure.

Amanda Philpott:

So we see it very much as a long-term relationship. At the moment, I'm a judge on the panel that is picking the next round of the innovators that they're supporting because we went through the program two years ago. So it's a nice bit of continuity.

Blaise Delfino:

Amanda, I admire your entrepreneurial spirit, and a lot of the listeners that we have, majority hearing care providers, audiologists, speech language pathologists, but there's also consumers who tune in as well. I'm curious to know what advice would you give to an organization in the hearing healthcare space that is just getting off the ground, or maybe someone has an idea, they have a proof of concept, whether it be a product or a service? Because I think we both understand that there are some innovations that die a slow death, and that is not eargym's case by any means, but how often have we heard of innovations and new products that have gone to market that have failed? Of course, you need to have a product or a service that's going to resonate with consumers, but what advice would you give to entrepreneurs and even small business owners today who are thinking of taking that step towards entrepreneurship, and what have you found to be successful for you and your team?

Amanda Philpott:

Well, the biggest lesson, I think, we take away from my whole journey of entrepreneurship is people do not want to buy eargym. They want their problem solved, and we need to make sure that eargym is solving the problem that people have. For a business to succeed, there need to be enough people with that problem. So identifying the people that you are targeting, understanding them and then listening to them really carefully to solve their problems is the most important thing to keep in mind for any entrepreneur. Nobody will just buy your product because you've built it. They have to have a problem that it solves.

Blaise Delfino:

Absolutely. I love that. People aren't buying eargym, eargym is the vehicle, but they're buying the solution to their problem. I think even mature companies out there can learn a lot from what you just said because especially from that marketing standpoint, oftentimes, you see even early-stage startups or mature organizations, their marketing is so heavily on what they do versus the problem that they solve. I think that paradigm shift can often be a little difficult to adjust to. But I think that was beautifully well said. So Amanda, what can we expect from eargym in the future?

Amanda Philpott:

First, I've mentioned one, which is about extending research into auditory processing disorders, so we know about the opportunity. It's always been on our roadmap, and we're just getting to that point where we think that we can go to all life stages and look at the opportunity of immersive auditory training across the spectrum, if you like. The second is that we are now at a place where we think that it would be helpful for us to consider medical regulations, medical devices, approval, FDA, et cetera. So we're going to start back journey.

Blaise Delfino:

Amanda, I want to thank you on behalf of The Hearing Matters Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us today. As co-founder and CEO of eargym, although we're recording this virtually, I feel the passion and the excitement that you and your team are bringing to the hearing healthcare space. Any final thoughts that you want to share with our listeners regarding eargym and hearing health?

Amanda Philpott:

Yeah, and thanks, Blaise. It's been a real pleasure to be here. My final thoughts are we are wanting to build a product that really makes a difference, and we really value user feedback. So if any of your listeners would like to try eargym and give us their thoughts, whether from a consumer or from a professional perspective, because that matters, very, very importantly too, then eargym is available on the app stores, on iOS and on Android. Also, just to find out a little bit more about eargym then the best places, our website, which is www.eargym.world.

Blaise Delfino:

You're tuned into The Hearing Matters Podcast, the show that discusses hearing technology, best practices and a growing national epidemic hearing loss. Today we had Amanda Philpott. She is the co-founder and CEO of eargym. To learn more, visit eargym.world and until next time, Hear Life's Story!