Hearing health is increasingly recognized as an important part of healthy aging, but it’s often something people address only after their hearing begins to deteriorate. Taking a different approach, U.K.-based eargym — an AgeTech Collaborative™ (ATC) startup participant — enables people to actively train and care for their hearing throughout their lives, with the goal of reducing their risk of dementia while also improving the quality of their everyday lives.
Amanda Philpott, Founder and CEO of eargym, recently shared with us her thoughts on the connection between hearing health and brain health, how people can get the most out of their hearing tech, and why the U.K.-based company is partnering with leading American medical centers to advance the effectiveness of early dementia interventions.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What is eargym all about, and why did you start the company?
The heart of eargym is an app that has a medical-grade test that allows you to check your hearing, and it provides auditory training games so you can practice listening. We also provide advice and guidance on ways you can look after your hearing. And if you need to see a hearing professional, we can help ratchet down the fear of that experience that you might be feeling — we want to help people feel confident when they go in to see their audiologist.
I was motivated to start eargym in 2020 because I realized not only that the size and scale of hearing loss is much bigger than most people know, but also that it is the biggest amenable factor in dementia. So I looked at what the barriers to good hearing are, especially with regard to unaddressed hearing loss.
First, there’s a lack of awareness — people may not even know they have hearing loss. Then there’s the fear of frailty: There’s a perception that hearing loss is only an "older people’s problem,” and that if you use hearing aids, you’re going to look like you’re approaching the end of your life. Then there’s the cost; the average cost of a pair of hearing aids is thousands of dollars.
I looked at all these barriers and the available solutions, and I saw that we could build something that would enable people to look after their hearing for life, putting their hearing health in their own hands — literally, with their smartphone and the eargym app.
Clearly, eargym can help those older adults and others who have obvious hearing loss, but as a preventative measure, it can benefit younger adults, too.
One in six people of working age are living with unaddressed hearing loss, and on average they will retire seven to nine years earlier than their counterparts without hearing loss. So there’s a massive impact on our productive lives and our economic well-being.
There’s also an impact on our mental well-being. When I was in my early 50s, I was in a senior role as a chief executive, and I got really fed up when chairing these big meetings because, for some reason, people had started muttering and not speaking clearly. But of course — in a hierarchy, people aren’t necessarily going to tell you that you’re the problem. So when I discovered that I had been living with moderate hearing loss, and that was why people had been “muttering,” I thought, “Oh, how much stress did I create for myself, and for others, because I didn’t look after my own hearing?”
So while eargym exists to contribute data to that challenge of the correlation between hearing loss and dementia, we are aimed at working-age people to enable them to act in a preventative way to look after their hearing and to extend their productive lives. If we can keep people confident and engaged, then we hope over time to demonstrate a positive impact on their productive lives, their relationships and their cognitive well-being.
You mentioned that the eargym app features auditory training games. What are those like, and what makes them effective?
We looked at clinical research that shows if you practice listening for three to five minutes at a time, five days a week, over a seven-week period you can improve your overall listening capacity by up to 25%.
The reason for that is that there are two parts to your hearing system. You have your sensory-neural system, which takes in the sound through your ear and sends it to the hair cells in your cochlea, which in turn send electrical signals to your brain.
Then, your brain applies meaning to the sound, which is important. I explain it like this: If you were an early human living in the woods, you need to be able to detect and then localize a sound, and then you need to discriminate it. Is it a branch falling? Is it something moving? Is it danger, or food?
We’ve built a suite of games that enable you to practice these hearing skills. There’s Busy Barista, where you’re the barista in various locations, like a cafe or a university. People come up and order coffee drinks from you, so you have the target sound — the order you’re trying to fulfill — which you have to distinguish from the ambient sounds and noise in the background. We increase or decrease the difficulty based on your performance.
Another of our games is Sound Seeker, where we use binaural audio in order to place different animals, for example, in certain places in an on-screen jungle, and you have to locate where that animal is based on the audio that’s coming in from the left compared to the right, and so on.
In effect, you’re training people to better enjoy the benefits of their hearing aids or other devices, not improving the devices themselves.
We are very much about complementing hardware such as hearing aids, not competing with it. Only about 40% of people who would benefit from a hearing aid get one. Then, among those who do, there’s a relatively high rejection rate because when your brain starts to hear sounds it hasn’t heard for a while, it can be overwhelming.
This happened to me. The first time I walked through town after I got my hearing aids, I was taken aback. All the shop signs were swinging and creaking; the cars were so noisy; I could hear cups chinking on saucers in the coffee shops, and I was startled by the amount of noise. Until I got used to my hearing aids, I spent a week or two just being startled all the time. I have moderate hearing loss; imagine how much worse the sensory overload is for someone with more profound hearing loss.
My hearing had faded over such a long time that I didn’t realize what I was no longer hearing. So, by giving people the opportunity to practice listening safely in their own home, we help them get used to and get the most of their hearing tech.
You’re based in the U.K., but you’ve begun working with American organizations to broaden eargym’s reach. Can you tell us more about that work?
First, we were selected to be part of the AgeTech Collaborative’s Spring cohort earlier this year. The ATC Accelerator was an exceptionally helpful experience, helping us understand things like how medical coding works and how products get reimbursed through insurance in the U.S. In November, we’ll also be part of the AgeTech Collaborative booth at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas.
We are also working with the Cleveland Clinic to develop a version of eargym called eargym CI Rehab, which is for people with cochlear implants. It refines eargym’s auditory training specifically for people with cochlear implants, where the level of hearing loss is more profound. That’s just become available in the marketplace.
And then, we just got onto the Mayo Clinic Berg Innovation Exchange, a philanthropic-funded initiative that put us in touch with Mayo Clinic’s clinical experts. We’re talking to them about how to design the best randomized control trial to demonstrate the therapeutic benefit of our auditory training.
We really value the working relationships that are developing in America. The U.S. has a focus on prevention — especially the importance of early intervention in dementia — that is very different from the focus in the U.K. We know you need to get in early and establish some population-wide health measures for effective prevention, and the opportunity to do that in partnership with businesses, insurers and other organizations is much greater in the U.S. So the work with ATC, the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic are part of a pattern of collaborations that have the potential to add massive value globally to this really important field.
Where do you see the biggest opportunities for eargym to make an impact in the coming year?
We’ve spent a long time building eargym, and we’re in a really strong position. Now what we want to do is build our partnerships. We understand the value of our data, and we’re looking for partners who can benefit from that data and can shape products and services for people to look after their hearing for life. It can also inform research that requires data on the correlation between hearing health and cognitive well-being. What we want is to make sure that any potential partners out there who need our kind of product know that we’re here, so that we can contribute in the best way that we can.
Want to learn more about eargym’s approach to lifelong hearing health? Visit the company’s website, or meet the team this November at HLTH USA, where eargym will be exhibiting alongside other AgeTech Collaborative startups building innovative solutions for healthy aging.
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