Watch the video or read the transcript below:
Hi there, welcome to Value Hearing’s YouTube channel.
I'm Emma. I'm a clinical audiologist and today's video is a bit of an impromptu update on a new hearing aid that has just been revealed just a few days ago by Oticon.
So, Oticon are a Danish company. They are one of the largest hearing aid companies in the world and they are highly highly respected.
They released a very successful hearing aid called OPN four and a bit years ago, so we were expecting they'd come out with something at some point, but they kept this one quite secret and it has been just very slightly revealed a few days ago, what should be coming in the next couple of weeks.
We know that you like to be kept up to date with this kind of thing so we thought we'd give you a little bit of synopsis in a video of what we have learned so far.
So we know it's called Oticon More. More is referring to their completely new way of approaching sound processing.
If you look at Oticon's website at all you will know that they are very into something called ‘brain hearing'. They've put a lot of time, a lot of effort, and actually a lot of research into how the brain works with processing sound and understanding environments.
Their whole focus has been, since even the last platform they released in OPN has been on brain hearing, so supporting your brain to understand and adjust to sounds better. Not about always prioritising speech over noise, but allowing you to understand speech over noise but still appreciate the sounds around you and to an extent OPN definitely seem to achieve that.
This hearing aid (the More) takes it one, or actually more like 10 steps further . It seems that they've completely rewritten the rules of how hearing aids will work.
They've used something called a Deep Neural Network to train the hearing aids and what a deep neural network is, it's a type of Artificial Intelligence so it is machine learning and artificial intelligence but it is to the extreme of artificial intelligence in that it is a network.
A neural network that can learn from experience is actually based on the human brain. The whole idea of it is not unique to Oticon at all. It has been used in lots of different areas of technology and you and I will have been using deep neural networks for years now in things like Google Assistant.
So it's a really clever technology but it requires a huge amount of data storage speed and no one has done that before, well not commercially available hearing aid has done this before. I have no doubt there are other manufacturers doing it right now but Oticon seems to be the first one to have released it.
What they've done this deep neural network has been used to be trained in 12 million different sound scenes. They're saying that they're the first hearing aid company to have ever left the lab, or broken out of the lab, and actually done this in real life so 12 million real life sound scenes.
They've got this amazing spherical 360 degrees microphone that has traveled through these 12 million sound scenes and has learned from experience how to balance them precisely so that you get the most from that environment so you understand the speech.
If there's speech in that environment, but it isn't always just the speech in front of you, it means you can probably hear the person trying to get your attention from behind. It means you'll also be able to appreciate the birds in the trees, the traffic sound, the music but it is going to have it really well balanced.
As you probably know, if you've worn hearing aids before, they don't always get the balance right. Sometimes all the noise goes, sometimes there's more noise than speech, sometimes the hearing aids are working so hard to focus on the speech that you feel cut off from, maybe, the speech behind you.
So we don't always get it right and sometimes we do get it right, you do hear the speech better than the backward noise but it can sound a bit distorted because of everything we've done to the signal.
And that has worked to a certain extent because it has meant people could understand speech in noisy environments but obviously it wasn't ideal, but we were working with the technology we had at the time.
What Oticon are saying is that they've trained this computer to completely, accurately balance that scenario - so amplify the different sounds completely differently in a way that you're able to then enjoy them just like a normal hearing person.
The normal hearing brain does a lot of work with the sound. All this sound comes into the ear through the cochlea, it becomes a neural code. Then it goes in through the brainstem and then the brain uses a subsystem called orient where it's deciding, ‘well where are the sounds coming from? What are the sounds? What's important? What isn't important to me? What do I want to filter out? What do I want to focus on? And that can change from second to second.
But when we have a hearing impaired brain, that's not so easy. So what Oticon are saying is that this hearing aid is going to do that for you. It's going to give you all that information in the correct balance so that you're able to enjoy the whole environment and probably, to a certain extent, then pick and choose what you want to listen to as well, but they're going to support you in that.
Like I said, they're making some huge claims here It sounds amazing what they're saying - the fact they're saying not only has the hearing aid being trained by a deep neural network (but) you will actually have a deep neural network on your ears all the time every time you're wearing it.
You've got this hearing aid with a computer that's so powerful it's able to constantly balance the environment for you.
It'll be pretty interesting to see when we get these out in the field and we have our clients who've been used to traditional hearing try them. And definitely clients who've never had hearing aids before trying them, and getting a bit of an idea of how they respond and if it really is as good as it says.
The other things that we've learned it's rechargeable only at this point.
I don't know if a zinc air model is coming. Their words, their language, suggests it's not; that they're going to just stay with rechargeable, which would make sense if it's a very powerful hearing aid. It could be quite heavy on the battery.
So they want to keep it rechargeable. We know it's probably going to be coming out in the next few weeks. I mean maybe before Christmas, most likely in January I'd imagine here in Australia.
We don't know anything about pricing or anything at this point. We do know that it connects to iPhones made for iPhone technology which they've always had with Oticon, but also they're going to be working with modern Android phones so anyone with an Android with 8.0 and up on the operating system.
There is already a list online of what phones are compatible with the Oticon More hearing aids.
So that's what we know so far.
We basically know that they're turning the industry on its head by the sounds of it, however I say all of that very cautiously because Oticon are, as I said, very highly respected. They're known for their engineering but they're also known for their marketing so as audiologists when we hear Oticon has something new we generally tread quite carefully because they can make a feature that has been used by another hearing aid manufacturer, even by themselves, sound really exciting and new and groundbreaking and often it's just been repackaged and remarketed so they're very good at that.
I don't think that that's what this is at all.
I do think this is genuine, but we don't know until we actually get the training next week and we actually see it for ourselves and we see the data. And more so to get you guys to wear them for us and give us some feedback on on what you think of a hearing aid that runs on deep neural networks.
It looks like what they're saying is they're not going to be using directional microphone technology or any sort of classic noise reduction which is crazy after you know, 30 years of that kind of technology being used, it's quite a big step but it wouldn't surprise me if they were giving that a go because they did break the mold with the OPN as well.
So time will only tell, very interesting times we're living in - 2020 is being a big one for the hearing aid industry.
