Time to Read: 7 minutes
Emma provides an update on the Oticon More, released in Australia in early January 2021. While it's still early days, things are looking promising with Oticon's newest hearing aid. Emma also discusses her next Oticon More update, which will include a Q&A with Oticon, so please add any questions you'd like to ask in the comments below.
Watch the video or read the transcript below:
Hi there I'm Emma from Value Hearing.
I'm a clinical audiologist and today's video is just a very quick video to let you guys know how we're tracking with the Oticon More.
I did post a video in December telling you how we at Value Hearing had found out that Oticon were about to sneakily release a new hearing aid after almost five years. And that it looked very, very exciting because they were doing something really quite different from the other manufacturers in the sense that they're using artificial intelligence and machine learning in different way.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been in our industry in some form for a long time, but what they're doing is using a Deep Neural Network that's actually onboard in the hearing aids.
Now what that means in real language is just they're going to have a particularly powerful, accurate hearing aid that is not necessarily going to rely on traditional directional microphones and noise reduction like all the others are in the industry and what we've been using for decades now in order to help people hear speech in background noise.
We have only had the (Oticon More) hearing aids available for a couple of weeks, we have had a bit of training on them and some insight into them but we've really only had them in the field for a very short period of time - on a few trial people a few guinea pigs of ours that have used other hearing aid manufacturers, some of the premium ones and are experienced users - so they can give us some really good feedback,
So far we've had some really positive comments such as, ‘they sound more natural, a bit more sharp and clear’. We've heard that this streaming sound quality is considerably better, generally the clients are saying that they prefer them to the other hearing aids.
How they're going in background noise, the jury is still out in terms of how well they're hearing speech. We've still got some more appointments that we need to do, some fine tuning and honestly we really do need to get more clients and more opportunities for these clients to try the hearing aids in more challenging environments, which is not that easy in the middle of a pandemic here in Australia.
We're definitely being probably a lot more social than we are in the US and the UK but we're still not quite in noisy environments as often as we used to be, but we will keep you informed of how that's going.
I have been told by a client that he does think he heard better in a very noisy situation than he did with some of their competitors but he still thinks the background noise was pretty loud. He could hear the conversation but he was quite surprised how loud the noise was but we still got some fine tuning to do, a bit of time, to get used to the new processing with him there.
For us in the clinic we are doing a little test ourselves it's a very small sample size with our clients that we're fitting with the Oticon More we're just testing how well they process the speech and noise for them when they're wearing the Oticon More.
It's not a great test for other hearing aids because other hearing aids are relying more on directional microphones and in this particular setup, the speech and the noise is coming from one direction whereas directional microphones like, it when it is coming from a different direction.
Obviously with Oticon they've obviously claimed, ‘look we don't necessarily need to rely on directional microphones to do that anymore because we've got this highly trained Deep Neural Network that knows pretty much what your client wants to hear and what they don't want to hear, and we can you know play with that contrast for them’.
So we thought it would be interesting to see how Oticon More copes with that test that we know that other hearing aids doesn't cope well with. And we have to say, the numbers are looking positive - that there's definitely an improvement, they're definitely doing what they say they're doing when it comes to, not just relying on directional microphones and classic noise reduction to improve the signal to noise ratio.
It'll be interesting to see, we do need to have more data and a much bigger sample size there. We obviously want to do more testing where the speech and noise is coming from different directions in the clinic as well.
So we will definitely keep you updated, but it looks like it isn't just hype that it wasn't just marketing from Oticon, but I don't want to say for sure yet. I need more clients and more opportunities, more types of hearing loss etc, etc to try it out for you, but we will definitely keep you informed.
