Transcript:

Hi, I’m Nick and I’m designing and building my own pair of custom hearing-enhancing wearables in my bedroom. And to do that, one of the first things we need to look at is what kind of components are actually going to be inside a device like this because that’s really going to define what kind of size and shape we can design this product to be.

Well, I’ve got here is a hearing aid and a Bluetooth earbud, because what we’re going to make is kind of going to be a mix of the two. So let’s take them apart and see what’s inside.

They’re actually both pretty much the same. They both have a battery, a speaker, a circuit board, which is like the brain of the device. The hearing aid's got a directional microphone and the earbud's got a connector, which just connects it to the battery inside the charging case.

I think this gives a pretty good idea of how big the components are going to be, which need to go inside. When it comes to positioning, these three components here go inside the main body of the hearing aid and that sits kind of discreetly behind the ear here. Then there’s this wire that runs down this little tube here into the ear canal.

And on the end we have the speaker, which then actually makes the sound that we hear. But this is way too hidden, so we don’t want it to be here. We don’t want it to be in the ear either. Actually I think this needs to be moved somewhere a bit more visible in front of the ear. So I think we actually need to move it here.

Have a great week!

Nick 🦋

‍