New Hearing Aid Company, Foretell, Brings in Steve Martin and Others as Fans
“I’ve tried different brands of hearing aids, and they’re good, but they’re not that good,” Martin says in a Zoom interview. He visited the team in Soho, did the street test and was delighted when he tried it with his wife and daughter at their favorite restaurant, with de Jonge sitting with the laptop at several tables. But the defining moment for Martin was a cocktail party.
“I was here in our building, I was at a party upstairs and I had my old hearing aids,” he says. “I’m sitting talking to four people and I realized I couldn’t understand any of them, and I go, wait, I have these new hearing aids. I went down, put them in, came back and I could hear everyone.” Now he wears them all the time and even made a joke about hearing aids. Saturday evening liveSpecial 50th anniversary of. “I don’t really think about how it was before,” he says. “I used to be afraid to go to restaurants, and now I’m not.” His friend Balaban, once he participates in the beta test, is also won over. “This is a significant improvement over the ridiculously expensive devices I was using,” says Balaban.
The other machers are not public, but de Jonge assures me that most of them are names invoked in bold letters. Since there are only a few dozen beta units, this means that some powerful people have been placed on a waiting list. Balaban’s wife, Lynn Grossman, describes attending a Labor Day dinner with more than 100 people, mostly of a certain age, in a private room at a restaurant, thinking that her husband and another man — a famous fashion CEO — were the only ones who could hear, because of Fortell. “Afterward, I think Bob got 12 or 14 emails asking, ‘How can I get these hearing aids?’ »
Now that the product is launched, Fortell will sell hearing aids at a single clinic on Park Avenue in Manhattan. It’s set up like a chic living room, with the devices displayed in a tasteful presentation straight out of the Apple retail playbook. Hanging on the wall is a silicon wafer with the circuitry for the custom chips. Initially, his team of four audiologists will only serve around twenty clients per week, to ensure that everything goes well. Regardless, even if production increases, supply will be limited.
That’s great for Fortell, but it seems like De Jonge’s initial push to introduce everyone’s grandparents to the land of the audience may be limited to the 1%, which doesn’t exactly qualify him for a Salk Medal. When I ask de Jonge how his invention can change the lives of the masses, his answers, whether due to secrecy about future plans or simply the lack of a good answer, seem wavy. In its defense, Fortell has resisted the temptation to raise the traditional price of high-end hearing aids: The $6,800 is actually a bit less than that of some other medically prescribed hearing aids. (As with other high-end hearing aids, the price is part of a package that includes fitting and assistance from professional audiologists.) Yet even this defensible price limits adoption; It’s a sad reality that some Medicare and many health insurance plans don’t cover hearing aids, a policy that condemns millions of people to an auditory bardo of conversational exclusion, isolating them from loved ones and accelerating dementia.
It’s unclear whether Fortell technology could find its way into cheaper over-the-counter hearing aids available today, which became possible thanks to a regulatory change in the Biden era. These include Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 devices and entries from other consumer electronics brands, which are generally known to help people with hearing loss, but not as much as high-end devices paired with professional assistance. The Fortell proposal requires careful testing and tuning, which continues for some time as users get used to the devices. Either way, this white glove approach will consume Fortell’s efforts for next year and beyond. Expansion will be through opening clinics in a few selected cities, and only later will Fortell consider expanding to allow others to sell the technology.
