Ralph Beckman watched his father lose his hearing and struggle to find a hearing aid that could help him. Nothing worked quite right. In crowded places, the devices amplified the background noise. The sound was distorted at high volume, and distant sounds were lost.
Beckman set out to do better, and today, he is chief technical officer of a Providence startup that is developing a new approach. The firm, Bionica Corp., has received funding from angel investors, and last week, the Slater Technology Fund announced it would invest $250,000.
“The Bionica team represents an outstanding combination of design, engineering and management talent, ideally suited to the challenge of bringing to market a fundamentally new technology for the hearing-impaired,” Richard G. Horan, managing director of the Slater Fund, said last Monday in announcing the investment.
“With the leadership and innovative technology being brought to bear, and the size of the market opportunity being addressed, we believe that the company has the potential to become a substantial business enterprise in the years to come.”
But Bionica is not in the hearing-aid business, stresses CEO Peter Hahn, who previously served as president of U.S. operations at Oticon, the world’s third-largest hearing-aid maker, and at one time served as chief operating officer for Lincoln-based QualityMetric.
“Bionica is in the sound processing business,” Hahn says on the company’s Web site, www.bionicahearing.com. “Our first product, Clio, will … serve the unmet needs of the hearing impaired by helping people to hear desired sounds in any listening condition.”
Bionica was founded by Beckman and fellow Design Lab Inc. principal Kipp Bradford. It was incorporated in January 2006 but traces its origins to 2005.
“We’ve been working on this for about two and a half years,” Bradford, the vice president of product development, said in an interview. “It’s an offshoot of work we’ve been developing over the course of the last three or four years.”
“Our current timeline is to bring products to market in the fourth quarter of 2008,” he added.
Bradford noted that technical difficulties aren’t the only problem with hearing aids.
“People don’t want to buy them until it’s too late,” he said. Industry research indicates that 5 million Americans use hearing aids, the Slater Fund said, and another 25 million experience hearing loss but do not wear one.
“I think we’re creating a product that people will want to have, that will get around the stigmas,” Bradford said. The Clio, he added, is “a fairly innovative solution to the problems of the hard of hearing.”
The device is designed to work equally well in a car, a theater, or a restaurant – any environment where it might be needed. Proprietary software will separate speech from noise, with different “programs” to filter sound differently in each environment.
Innovative design is nothing new for the Design Lab partners. Bradford, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in bioengineering at Brown University, had worked at Design Lab for the past 10 years, serving as vice president of engineering for the past four. He also has served as co-founder and chief scientist at dental diagnostic startup Q-Labs and co-founder of Dewhurst Solution LLC.
Beckman has more than 35 years’ experience as an architect, engineer, product designer, inventor and entrepreneur. Before founding Design Lab in 1986, he was founder and CEO of Aeolian Kinetics Inc., a designer and maker of scientific instruments and data acquisition hardware. His prize-winning architectural firm, Beckman, Blydenburgh and Associates, was responsible for projects including the Davol Square Marketplace and Brown’s Urban Environmental Laboratory. Beckman also has served as a technical policy consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Energy and NASA.
He studied engineering, architecture and industrial design at the University of Michigan and Rhode Island School of Design.
Design Lab is now “in limbo,” Bradford said, “because all the employees at Design Lab are working full-time at Bionica.” The new company is leasing space from the old – an arrangement he said “allows us to use the appropriate amount of resources.”
“The team here in-house is five of us,” Bradford said, “then we’ve got an electrical engineering firm we’re contracting with [Bay Computer Associates]. … We have a very close working relationship.”
The Slater investment will be used for “continuing our research and design, our patent work, market research … ongoing product development,” Bradford said.
“Bionica is very pleased to have received the support of the Slater Technology Fund,” Hahn said in a statement. “Not only do we appreciate the financial aspect of Slater’s commitment, but we also know that Slater will provide our young company with important business contacts within the Rhode Island community.”
The Slater Technology Fund, established in 1997 by then-Gov. Lincoln Almond and the R.I. General Assembly, provides seed capital to technology-based businesses in Rhode Island. Additional information is available at www.slaterfund.com.
To learn more about Bionica Corp. and its founders, visit www.bionicahearing.com.
