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Jacoti BV is a private European medical company headquartered in Wevelgem, Belgium that specializes in personalized audio and audiology. Jacoti’s founder and CEO is Jacques Kinsbergen and Jacoti’s “non-executive Directors” are Dr. Andrzej Zarowski, Nils van Dam, and Prof. Dr. Erwin Offeciers. Jacoti’s mission is “to make state-of-the-art hearing solutions accessible and affordable for people with hearing loss throughout the world. As a company, we realise this mission by focusing on the development and commercialisation of hearing aid software and hearing support systems. We achieve this by integrating our proprietary technology with internet-ready consumer hardware such as earphones and by making our technology available to 3rd parties.” Jacoti leverages consumer technology to create audiologically-valid hearing solutions. Their technology can be found in four apps for iOS: ListenApp, Hearing Center, Hearing Center Pro, and Lola. On 20 October, 2020, Qualcomm announced a collaboration with Jacoti “to bring Jacoti’s hearing enhancement software to the Qualcomm® QCC5100 Series Ultra-Low Power Bluetooth SoCs.” This would enable companies using Qualcomm’s QCC51xxx Series SoCs to develop true wireless earbuds and Bluetooth headsets that integrate Jacoti’s hearing fitting and personalization technology. Jacoti has also developed earCloud, a hearing health database and expert fitting system that enables for remote fitting tele-audiology for its technology.

Jacoti Corporate History for Wikipedia Draft 1.0 April 1, 2021

Jacques Kinsbergen, the founder and CEO of Jacoti, began his hearing health career in 1984 when he joined a group of researchers at the University of Antwerp, Belgium to create Laura, the first multi-channel European cochlear implant. Kinsbergen then co-founded Philips Hearing Implants, a private company to further develop Laura. In 2000, Philips Hearing Implants was acquired by Cochlear Limited and became Cochlear Technology Centre Europe (CTC Europe).

Jacoti was founded in 1990 as a consultancy company that supported and guided medical device companies in their efforts to introduce their products into the European market. Starting in 2010, Kinsbergen assembled a group of partners (including the cochlear implant manufacturer Med-El) “to investigate the needs of those with hearing difficulties and chart the way forward for hearing technologies worldwide, particularly in fast-developing markets such as India.”

In 2010, realizing that the iPhone had audio hardware and software technology that could be leveraged for hearing assistance, Jacoti assembled a team of engineers to fashion solutions for people with mild to hearing losses. The Jacoti programming team developed Hearing Kit, a cross-platform SDK that provided tools for hearing assistance signal processing. In the summer of 2012, Jacoti released ListenApp, their first iOS app which enabled the iPhone’s microphone and signal processors to be used with Apple EarPods for hearing assistance. A hearing expert could also enter a code into the app which would unlock a hidden menu that enabled the expert to tailor the signal processing for an individual’s hearing. Also in 2012, Jacoti released a version of ListenApp for Mac.

After the release of ListenApp, Kinsbergen decided to turn Jacoti into a medical device company so that it could link users to experts via the cloud and provide audiologically-valid hearing assistance to people with hearing loss. By late 2013, Jacoti had a CE- and FDA-compliant Quality Management System completely in place and the company received their first CE mark. ListenApp for iOS was registered as an FDA Class I Medical Device. A published study confirmed ListenApp’s efficacy for people with mild to moderate hearing losses. Due to regulatory compliance issues, ListenApp for Mac was renamed Jacoti Amplifier and relaunched with a more limited feature set (it is now discontinued).

Also in 2013, Jacoti released their second iOS app, Lola, that utilized the Opus codec to provide high quality low latency wireless audio streaming between iOS devices. Lola was the first consumer technology available that enabled consumer-level Wi-Fi to be utilized with iOS devices to create wireless assistive listening systems for classrooms, seminars, and meetings. In the fall of 2016, for example, sixty Lola devices were simultaneously deployed during the keynote for AuDacity, the annual conference the Academy of Doctors of Audiology. Originally, the only way to enter audiological data into ListenApp was to utlilize a pre-existing audiogram and enter the data by hand. Therefore, in 2014, Jacoti partnered with Dr. Frans Coninx of Bonn University, acquiring the rights to his Duo-Tone method of audiometry, which Jacoti subsequently patented. Utilizing Duo-Tone, Jacoti released Hearing Center for iOS which enabled users to run a hearing self-assessment in a quiet room. Clinical testing demonstrated that the results of a properly-administered Hearing Center self-assessment were as accurate as a Pure Tone Average audiogram created in an audiologist’s office. Hearing Center was certified by the CE and registered with the FDA as a Class II Medical Device.

In 2015 Hearing Center Pro was released for the iPad. This audiometer application was calibrated for traditional audiological headsets such as the Sennheiser HDA 300 and the Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro. Hearing Center Pro also enables clinicians to store test data and fine-tune hearing fittings for multiple clients in Jacoti EarCloud, a cloud-based hearing database.

In 2016, the Jacoti Hearing Suite — ListenApp, Lola, and Hearing Center — was awarded a CES Innovation Award.

In February of 2018, Kinsbergen and members of the Jacoti team attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where they met with representatives of Qualcomm about the potential of deeply embedding medical-grade hearing technology in Qualcomm’s audio-enabled consumer chips. The Jacoti team decided to port Jacoti’s software to Qualcomm’s QCC5121 SoC and by September of 2018 were able to successfully stage a demo for Qualcomm executives of Jacoti ListenApp running on the Qualcomm chip.

Over the next year and a half, Jacoti continued to port its software to Qualcomm hardware. By 2020, Jacoti had their technology running on the QCC 514x series SoCs. These chips, which can be used to create true wireless earbuds, are a potential platform for low-cost hearing devices that will conform to upcoming FDA regulations mandated by the Over the Counter Hearing Act of 2017 (Jacoti’s software already meets FDA requirements for legacy Class I medical hearing aid devices). In October, 2020, Jacoti and Qualcomm jointly announced their collaboration.