Do We Even Need Hearing Aids Anymore? AirPods, OTC Hearing Aids & The Future of Hearing

AirPods are getting better, OTC hearing aids are easier to buy than ever, and AI is showing up in every corner of consumer audio. That leads to one of the most important questions in hearing health right now: are we watching hearing aids get replaced, or are we finally widening the front door to better hearing?

I take you behind the marketing and into what actually changes outcomes. OTC hearing aids are built for adults with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss, but perception is not diagnosis. We talk through what a comprehensive audiology evaluation can uncover, why prescription hearing aids are programmed to an individual hearing profile, and how verification steps like real ear measurements turn “sounds louder” into “speech is clearer,” especially in real-world noise.

We also zoom out to the human side of hearing loss: listening effort, fatigue, misunderstandings, and the quiet slide into social withdrawal. Whether someone starts with earbuds, OTC devices, a hybrid model, or professional care from day one, the mission stays the same: connection to family, friends, and daily life. If this perspective helps, subscribe, share the episode with someone you care about, and leave a review so more people find better hearing guidance.

Visit our website and take our quick online hearing screener. 

And if you're ready to take the next step, our online hearing care provider locator can help you find a trusted hearing care professional near you. Taking that first step can make a meaningful difference, helping you stay connecting to the people and moments that matter most. 

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Transcript

Welcome And The Big Question

Blaise M. Delfino, M.S. - HIS 0:06

Welcome back to the Hearing Matters Podcast, where we explore hearing technology, communication science, and the people and ideas shaping the future of hearing health care and hearing loss around the world. Before we kick things off, a special thank you to our partners. Care Credit. Here today to help more people here tomorrow. Inventis. Inventis is innovation. Blueprint Solutions. Clinic management made easy for hearing care professionals. Now with Blueprint AI. And Fader Plugs, the world's first custom adjustable earplug. Welcome back to another episode of the Hearing Matters Podcast. I'm your founder and host, Blaze Delfino. And as a friendly reminder, this podcast is separate from my work at Starkey. Now let's get into the conversation. The million dollar question: Are AirPods replacing hearing aids? Are OTC hearing aids enough? And with AI making everything smarter, faster, and more accessible, do we even need hearing aids anymore? Now, this is not a clickbait question. This is a real question that more consumers are asking right now. Because let's be honest, AirPods are getting better, and OTC hearing devices are more available than ever. I look back to where we were in 2020 to where we are in 2026. OTC hearing aids, they're they're more available. Technology is becoming smarter every single day, and overall access to hearing healthcare is much easier. And the barriers to entry are dropping fast. So if all of what I just expressed is all true, then why would anyone still need professionally fit hearing aids? Today, I'm going to unpack one of the biggest conversations that's happening in hearing healthcare. And I really want to do it from a perspective most people can't offer. Because I'm not speaking in theory. I'm speaking as someone who owned a private hearing healthcare practice and watched the OTC wave arrive in real time. So I saw the fear, the confusion, the marketing, and I saw what consumers believed, and then I saw what actually happened. So today we're cutting through all of that noise. I just want to preface this episode. This is not anti-technology. It's not anti-AirPods, and this is not anti-OTC. This episode in totality is pro-educ, pro-outcomes, and pro-patient. Because at the end of the day, we are here to help consumers and professionals make educated hearing healthcare decisions. And by the end of this episode, you'll understand the difference between buying a device and solving a hearing problem. So let me take you back for a moment. When OTC Hearing Aids first entered the market, there was a lot of noise, pun intended. A lot of headlines, a lot of promises that consumers were coming into our office asking about, a lot of messaging around lower cost, easier access, no appointments, you don't need to see a hearing care professional, zero testing, just purchase these online, skip the professional. And in many cases, the go-to-market strategy for OTC hearing aids, it wasn't just promoting convenience. It was subtly, or I mean, not so subtly, positioning hearing healthcare professionals as the problem. So the narrative became you're paying too much, you don't need a hearing test, you don't need a provider, you can do this yourself. And as a former practice owner, I watched this closely. I mean, I was like a hawk watching all of this. Because if you reduce hearing health care to simply buying a gadget, you miss the entire point. Hearing loss is not just a retail transaction, it's a healthcare issue, it's a communication issue, it's quality of life, and it's often a relationship issue. And what many consumers didn't realize then and still don't fully realize now is that hearing technology is only one part of the equation. The other part is the professional guiding the process. And I recently released some content talking about how AI is, you know, potentially going to replace the hearing care professional. And that's a huge topic today. And I let consumers and professionals know that AI is not going to replace the hearing care professional. It's going to make the devices better, but we are still social beings. We are humans, and humans crave that interaction. Even if you're an ambivert, which is extrovert and introvert, we crave that social human interaction. So going to a hearing health care professional to start your journey to better hearing, I honestly don't foresee AI ever, ever, ever impeding the role of the professional. Now, I want to talk about why I, as a former private practice owner and current hearing health care professional and key opinion leader in the hearing healthcare industry, why I didn't fear OTC and why I don't fear OTC. Now, here's where I may differ from others. I didn't panic. I did not treat OTC like the end of hearing care, which we saw a lot in our industry. I treated OTC like an opportunity, and I still treat it as an opportunity. It's an opportunity to raise awareness because for decades, one of the biggest challenges in hearing health care has been this. Patients wait too long, they delay treatment, they normalize hearing loss, and then they start to tell themselves, well, I hear fine, people just mumble. You know, it's really not that bad. So if OTC products got more people thinking about hearing and hearing loss, then that was valuable. If AirPods got younger consumers talking about hearing support, in my professional opinion, that was valuable. If mainstream tech made hearing loss less stigmatized, which I truly believe that it has and it continues to do so, that's valuable. But I also knew something important, and that's awareness alone is not the same as treatment. Interest alone is not the same as outcomes. And curiosity alone is not the same as care. So while I saw some disruption, I really saw and see OTC hearing aids as an opportunity to educate my community, to really show why hearing care professionals still matter and explain what we do differently, and to really demonstrate value. Frankly, in my personal opinion, OTC forced many, many, many practices to level up. And what do I mean by this? I'm talking better communication, not only in the clinic, but in the community, better branding. It wasn't just photos of individuals who are 65 plus wearing hearing aids, better education. And what I mean by better education is professionals now talking about the comorbidities linked to untreated hearing loss. And I don't mean the fear-mongering marketing where it's like if you don't get these hearing aids, you will get dementia. That is incorrect. But what I mean is professionals adopting the literature, reading the literature, making sense of the literature, and then going out into their community and educating their community members. And I really believe that it forced practices to level up their patient experience. There was a statistic that by 2020, consumers were going to make the majority of their purchasing decisions based on the experiences that they had at whether it be a store or a doctor. And what do we see today? Patients value and people value that experience. And just in general, of course, we talk about welcoming OTC. Competition can sharpen industries, and in so many ways, it did so in the hearing healthcare industry. I think the biggest misconception I still see today is simple. People think OTC hearing aids and prescription hearing aids are basically the same thing. They are not. Let's start with who OTC hearing aids are intended for. So OTC hearing aids are designed for adults with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss. And that word really does matter. Perceived. Perceived means that you think your hearing loss is mild to moderate, but perception is not diagnosis. I want to repeat that one more time. Perception is not diagnosis. You cannot accurately determine your type of hearing loss, degree of hearing loss, whether you present with asymmetry, any medical red flags, speech understanding deficits, cochlear function, just by guessing. That requires a comprehensive audiological evaluation conducted by a licensed hearing health care professional. Now, compare that with prescriptive hearing technology. Prescription hearing aids are programmed to an individual hearing loss. They can serve patients with mild loss, moderate loss, severe loss, and profound loss. So the bandwidth is much broader, flexibility is greater, and the precision is far, far more advanced. And that matters because hearing loss is personal. No two hearing losses are the same. Two people with the same audiogram can have different communication needs. There's different lifestyles. One may be more socially active than the other. And you, as a hearing care professional, if you're a hearing care professional tuned in, will learn what their social activity level and their lifestyle is, test their hearing, and then make that appropriate technology recommendation, not only based on their type and degree of hearing loss, but social activity as well. Patients will have different dexterity. Again, we talk about dexterity as it relates to hearing technology. So a patient who has decreased dexterity, I might and would most likely recommend a custom component to their hearing technology. So if they have really bad dexterity and they have okay vision, most likely going to recommend a full shell custom hearing aid. Patients also might have different expectations, different noise environments, which of course parallels that of what their social activity level is. And in totality, this is why customization matters. Two patients, similar audiogram, different expectations, different social activity level. This is where hearing healthcare gets really fun and pretty awesome, in my opinion, for lack of a better term, because you, as a clinician, taking the clinician's point of view, you're not only testing the patient's hearing, but you have this differential diagnosis going on of what is going to be best for this patient. Yes, what do they want? What do they need? But you as the professional, you're guiding that conversation. When I was in clinic, patients used to ask me, and this was, I would say on a weekly basis, why are your hearing aids more expensive than devices I can buy online? And I would always say that is a fair question. And I never got defensive, I never argued, never took it personally. But I really did see this as an opportunity to educate my patients because I knew that they were not comparing apples to apples, they were comparing a product to a process. Now, let me explain this a little bit. When you work with a hearing care professional, you are not just paying for the hardware. So you're not just paying for the hearing aids and the beeps and the bops and all that testing. You are paying for expertise, diagnostics, verification, outcomes, and support, which is what we refer to a lot as counseling. So it's not just the gadget. We always say that the hearing aid is only a third of the process. And this is where I believe living in this time of OTC devices, consumers being able to purchase devices online, we as hearing care professionals have the opportunity to sort of flex our best practices a little and really educate the consumer on why they need to come in to the office. And I want to use this as an opportunity to review what best practice care includes, which is video autoscopy, which allows the hearing care professional to review and see your eardrum, if there's any impaction of wax, ear infection, et cetera. Then tympanometry, which measures the middle ear function, autoacoustic emissions, measures that inner ear function, pure tone audiometry, bone conduction testing, speech and noise testing, counseling, the hearing aid fitting, real ear measurements, which every hearing care professional should do, objective verification, outcome questionnaires like the abbreviated profile hearing aid benefit, if a patient presents with tinnitus or ringing in their ears, the tinnitus handicap index, follow-up fine-tuning, and then maintenance and support. That is hearing health care. What I just reviewed there is personalized care. That is not the same as opening a box. And here's the analogy I always think about. A race car is incredibly powerful. You're talking over 200 miles an hour, some of them. But if you put me behind the wheel of that race car, I'm not maximizing it. Put a professional driver behind the wheel, though, now you're gonna see what it can really do. Hearing technology is similar. Yes, the device matters, but who is steering the ship, in my opinion, matters even more. And since we're talking about the human side or, you know, the human element of hearing and hearing healthcare, we are living in the most socially connected era in human history. We've got texting, video calls, voice notes, social media, remote work, constant, constant, constant communication. We are bombarded with messages every single day, 24-7. Hopefully, not when we're sleeping, but maybe. And yet, many people are more disconnected than ever. Well, Blaze, how can you say that? Well, now research is showing that loneliness is actually worse than smoking cigarettes. And there's some research out there that is displaying that. We live in a loneliness epidemic, and patients who present with untreated hearing loss are at an increased risk of social withdrawal. Hearing loss isolates, hearing loss creates friction, it creates fatigue, it creates misunderstandings. If you're someone maybe who has a family member who presents with hearing loss, but they don't wear hearing aids, when I just said it creates misunderstandings, you probably shook your head yes, because maybe you've had conversations with a spouse or a loved one who has hearing loss, and they just didn't quite understand what you said because they couldn't hear what you said. They couldn't maybe understand the F as in Frank or S as in Sam, which those consonant fricatives they tie meaning to those words. Hearing loss creates withdrawal. And as we were talking about, we live in a loneliness epidemic. So whether the technology is an AirPod, whether it's an OTC device or a prescription hearing aid, I think that the bigger mission is connection. It's helping someone hear their spouse, hear their grandchild, their co-workers, their world around them. That's why this conversation really does matter, not because of products, it's because of people. What we're doing as hearing care professionals is we are connecting people to their loved ones through better hearing, through the technology. The technology is going to decrease that overall listening effort for them so they don't have to work so hard. And it's just not only going to increase their speech understanding, but enhance their quality of life, enhance their interpersonal relationships, and it's going to give them life back. So, where is all of this going? I would say that my honest take is the future is not one product replacing another. The future is choice. Now, you're gonna have, and you have today, different products for different people. You'll have different entry points for different readiness levels. Now, what do I mean by readiness levels? When I was practicing full-time and a patient would come into the office, this was all part of the motivational interviewing. And of course, prior to coming in, patients, some of them were going through that grieving process. Maybe they had a friend who, before their appointment, said, hearing aids suck and they don't work. I mean, I'm just gonna be candid here because there are some patients who say that, who wear hearing technology because most oftentimes they did not have a good experience with the hearing care professional who did not conduct best practices. However, on the flip side of that, maybe that patient just wasn't ready for technology, and then they had buyers remorse. So there is, of course, a psychological component tied to this journey, right? But readiness levels. I would always say, Mrs. Smith, what would you like to accomplish today? And then we would go through that motivational interviewing process. And I would always ask, just out of curiosity, if we do find that you present with a decrease in hearing sensitivity, notice I didn't say hearing loss, I would always say a decrease in hearing sensitivity. How ready are you to take that next step towards better hearing? Now that wasn't me implementing play on words or, you know, high sales pressure tactics by any means. I was genuinely curious how motivated is this patient? And that also gave me information of, okay, this patient's highly motivated. I of course don't want to bore them with the minutiae. And then I would say, I want you to know, my goal here is not to convince you to purchase hearing technology. My goal here is to help you and your wife or and your husband make an educated hearing healthcare decision regarding your communication lifestyle. And you see how those words really do matter. Because it's all how we frame this. Yes, we talk about hearing loss, but in my opinion, using the term decrease in hearing sensitivity doesn't make that patient feel like they're already losing. So let's lean out now with the different readiness levels. Because some patients need that immediate professional care, and some may need a hybrid model, and that's okay. But as technology expands, professional guidance becomes more important, not less, because more options create more confusion. Think of the last time you went to a restaurant and their menu was ginormous. I mean, I'm talking going to a diner, you have nine pages, 11-point font. I think you might be a little overwhelmed. That's when I put it down and I go to my go-to, whether that's a Western omelet, if I'm at a diner, I'll eat breakfast any time of day. But more options create more confusion. People still need trusted experts. I may ask the waitress or the waiter, what are your specials today? What do you recommend? I believe that hearing care professionals who win in the future will be the ones who educate locally, who are showing up in their community, who are building trust, explaining outcomes, and really leading with empathy. Professionals who stop selling devices and start owning the hearing healthcare conversation, that's where we're going to see that massive shift locally. Hearing healthcare is community-based. So I am encouraging and I am motivating, I hope, hearing care professionals. If you're tuned into this and if you're a consumer, please join the movement, raise awareness of better hearing, raise awareness of hearing healthcare. I also do want to touch on some people and some patients starting with AirPods or OTC devices. This is a message to my hearing healthcare professionals. If a patient comes in asking you about OTC hearing aids and if it's okay to buy hearing aids online, please do not take that as an insult and get defensive because those patients are trusting you with their hearing. There's a reason why they're dedicating time out of their day to physically be in your office. So while you might want to show them how smart you are and that you really know how compression works with you know attack and release and compression ratio. And I love that stuff. I am a hearing nerd. Just walk them through the journey. That is so important because you are the professional who, as I said about a minute ago, you're explaining outcomes, you're leading with empathy. Those who stop selling devices and start owning the hearing healthcare conversation, that is where we're going to see so many more patients being helped, not only throughout their hearing journey, but following their hearing journey. So that question, do we even need hearing aids anymore? Yes. But more importantly, we need better hearing outcomes. Now, how do we measure that? There is a plethora of outcome measures. I always talk about the abbreviated profile of hearing aid benefit. If you're a consumer tuned in and if you're interested in getting hearing aids or you just started your hearing journey, I'd encourage you to ask your hearing care professional who fit you with your technology. Ask them if they can conduct the AFAB, APHAB, abbreviated profile of hearing aid benefit. And that gives you a really nice picture of where you were pre-hearing aid and then post-hearing aid. And I would always actually conduct that once a year with my patients. Even my patients who were current hearing aid users, it always gave me a really nice picture of where they're at currently with their technology. We also need earlier action, but what we are seeing in Market Track 2025 is that consumers are not waiting seven to 10 years to address their hearing loss anymore. We're really seeing, you know, that that four-year mark, which is excellent. I mean, that's that's like almost half, right? And why do I think that's happening? It's because hearing care professionals are raising awareness in their community. You, hearing care professional listening, kudos to you. Tap yourself on the back because you are raising awareness in your community, in your clinic. We need earlier action, we're getting earlier action. We also need trusted professionals. And this is a platform that we've built since 2019. We're also here to help professionals make educated hearing healthcare decisions. And what do I mean by that? Let's continue to implement best practices in totality, not just one best practice and let everything, you know, fall to the wayside. Yes, we need hearing aids, but more importantly, we need more awareness and we need less stigma. And we need to remember this has never just been about hearing aids. It has always been about helping people stay connected to life, remain connected to their loved ones, to their family. So when they see their grandchildren on the weekend or they go to a, you know, maybe it is a family reunion, they don't feel isolated. They feel connected. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you are a hearing healthcare professional, this is your moment to lead. I'm Blaze Delfino, and this is the Hearing Matters Podcast. Until next time, hear life story.