A (Lack of) Review on Cyber-Security and Privacy Concerns in Hearing Aids

The ever-growing number of cyber-attacks over the last few years has put both individuals, as well as large-scale organisations, in a state-of-emergency situation. In the dawn of a Big Data / Internet-of-Things era, the discovery and use of personal information for individual profiling raises significant information privacy concerns, challenging regulators around the globe. As hearing aids are often the most effective therapeutic measure for an individual with hearing loss, the number of active devices that could be potentially cyber-controlled and used for malicious reasons suggests that this threat is not to be taken lightly. The aim of this paper is to identify how cyber-security and privacy concerns have arisen over the last years based on the advances in the communication protocols used by hearing aids and their security, the identification of potential hacking and cyber-attacking methods aimed at these devices and the need for potential countermeasures and actions to be taken more seriously in order to ensure patients' privacy.