In this video, Emma discusses the launch of the latest Phonak platform: Paradise.
Transcript:
Hi there, welcome back to Value Hearing's youtube channel. Im Emma, a clinical audiologist and today what I want to talk about is the Phonak Paradise hearing aid. I'm
talking about that today because it's been released today the first of september here
in Australia. I did attend along with most of the staff at Value Hearing, a two-hour
workshop online about the Phonak Paradise just last week. So, this is just a video to basically give you a bit of an overview of what looks to be quite exciting about this launch and what it means for you as a potential hearing aid wearer or current hearing aid wearer looking for new technology. So, very quick background Phonak released a hearing aid called
Marvel in , it was hugely successful for them and this new phonak paradise is just
building on the marvel, so not a huge amount has changed from the marvel there's just a
a few additions. They have changed the chip set so it
does have twice the memory that was available with marvel and that seems to be what's really
driving a lot of these new features that they weren't able to offer before.So number one for me of what looks most exciting moving forward with the paradise is their improved bluetooth connection.So they're claiming and other audiologists in america who've already fitted these devices before us Australians got a hold of them are saying that the bluetooth connection is a lot more stable if you've never had a bluetooth enabled hearing aid before you may not appreciate this but bluetooth connections with hearing aids have been a bit of an issue over
the years.
So, not just with phonak with all hearing aid manufacturers it's quite a regular problem that comes up in the clinics, that people's mobile phones and their hearing aids are not always
reliable with their connections and it is frustrating! So it's so so great to
hear that phonak by the sounds of it have improved the reliability of the bluetooth connection,
time will tell! The other thing that has improved with their bluetooth is that now you can actually have two active bluetooth connections so that means you could have a work phone and a personal phone connected at the same time meaning you could be streaming on one of them,some media watching, a youtube video for example but if you get a phone call
from the other you will know about it. Before this was not possible you couldn't just change from
one to the other. A lot of my clients like to use a tablet at home so they may be watching tv on a tablet now they'll be able to actually do that and also have awareness of what's happening on their phone. They're able to take a phone call on the phone once the phone calls end you can
actually then re-establish your streaming with your tablet so this will be really good for a lot of
our clients. Another nice bonus, they've added the ability to have eight different bluetooth devices paired at the same time so that means you can have an array of phones you could have your bluetooth tv you could have any sort of smart devices at home paired to the hearing aids and you're able just to pick and choose which one you want to connect to without having to unpair and repair them like you had to before. In the vein of phone calls and bluetooth connections i'll also tell you something else that i think looks quite exciting they've added an accelerometer into the hearing aids which i'll talk a bit more in a few minutes but basically that accelerometer will now allow some models of the paradise to have what they call 'tap control' so when a phone call comes through when you hear it in your ears before with marvel the only choice you had was to either answer it on the phone manually or press a button on the back of the hearing aid now you're actually able to double tap the ear or double tap the hearing aid to take that phone call and when you want to end the phone call you can double tap as well, that will be just give you a little bit more fluidity with the phone calls i think. A lot of my clients will find it a little bit tricky sometimes to find that button on the back of the hearing aid so that double tap function will be really great for those that find that dexterity a bit challenging. The other thing that they've added with the bluetooth phone calls as well, it's not a new technology to phonak a few good few years ago they released accessories that would allow you to take phone calls and you'd be able to hear an announcement in your ear of who was calling you, so a voice would say "Angela calling" for example, if they were saved in your phone or they'd read out the number if the number wasn't saved in your phone. This wasn't possible with marvel and it was such a great feature i did really miss it so i'm really excited to see that with Paradise you will have it so it just means that a lot of my clients who do a lot of work on the phone for example when they have their phone in their handbag, their pocket or the boot of their car when the phone rings, they'll be able to hear who it is calling them in their ears they'll be able to double tap to take the phone call double tap to end the phone call so i think this just again improves the whole experience of Hands-free. So, i mentioned the accelerometer that's the next thing that i think is quite exciting so they've got this new motion sensor hearing, it's not new to the industry but it is new to phonak basically what it means for you is that the hearing aid now knows if you're sitting down or standing still versus moving so you may be walking with your partner and you've got them talking next to you. Well now the hearing aids will know that and traditionally what you had to do to optimize the technology there was to turn your head to look at that person while you were walking to really make use of the directional microphone technology and the noise reduction but now the hearing aids know that you probably don't want to just focus where you're looking when it comes to understanding speech that you do want to hear all around you when you're moving so they will help you hear that person next to you or behind you for that matter it also will give you more awareness of traffic noise or any other noises around you more than what it would have before. A really good example one of Phonak's competitors last year released a similar technology which has been really successful for them and a lovely example they gave us at the training was that if you had someone who was working as a waiter or a waitress and they're walking through the restaurant you do not want the hearing aids assuming because they're somewhere noisy that they only want to hear who they're looking at you want them to be able to hear their customers trying to get their attention from around them so that's where this accelerometer will really help so it'll be again very interesting to see what the feedback is from our clients as to whether they notice this improvement, but the research indicates that clients do prefer to have motion sensors in their hearing aids when it comes to understanding speech in noisy environments. The other thing that will be quite exciting for some of my clients is something called 'speech enhancer' so, again not completely unique to the industry but new for phonak so there's this classic situation that we get in the clinics a lot where clients will come in and say that they're struggling to hear someone in the family at home for example from a significant distance or they've got someone in their lives that just speaks really really softly so when you're in quiet what will happen when the hearing aid recognizes that there is a soft voice or a distant voice it will actually give a bit of a boost to that speech and help you hear them better. So we did have options to fix this before, so if a client came in we could go into the Phonak software and help them with hearing better the distance speech and the soft speech but the enhancement that we would make would often mean that they also heard things like air conditioning a bit louder and other soft signs louder so it's nice to now know that the hearing aids are able to just pick out this very soft speech and not necessarily amplify all those other soft sounds around them. They've also added another feature in their premium level hearing aid a new 'dynamic noise cancellation' system it's basically just a new algorithm to support people to understand speech and noise better but they're claiming that it will improve the signal signal-to-noise ratio by up to four decibels, four decibels is A huge, huge amount so that's a really big Claim so i am very excited to see when i've got some clients trialling the premium Technology how much better they're reporting back to me that they can understand speech in noise. Because, like i said four decibels is a really big claim! Another thing they've done is improve on their fitting formula so their fitting formula for Marvel was definitely very successful we had lots of really positive feedback that it sounded very natural and people were hearing well with it but they've added a few things i'm not going to go into really big detail on this but basically they've made the new algorithm more natural in sound quality you in theory should be able to understand speech in very very noisy situations better you should also notice that reverberant rooms and echoey environments are more comfortable, the other thing they've done is improve “first fit acceptance”. Now, essentially what this just really means is that they've made some adjustments so that if you were to purchase a hearing aid and the audiologist was to just click and fit that hearing aid to Phonak specifications and hand it to you that you would find that sound quality more enjoyable to listen to than you would have with marvel but essentially that's not something that should happen often. Most of the time when you go and get a hearing aid fitted you should have a real ear measurement so it should be fitted for you with some objective testing done by the audiologist but for some reason you aren't able to access real ear measurements or you're being fitted remotely or the equipment isn't working in the clinic then this first fit acceptance from the click and fit option from Phonak will be I suppose quite useful. So there we go those are the main things that i think we'll be talking about over the next few months as being stand out features of the phonak paradise but only time will tell we'll send you another video out in the next couple of weeks couple of months, once we've fitted a few and gotten some really good feedback from a variety of people if you've tried the paradise or would like to try the paradise leave a little comment in the box below if you'd like us to cover any other topics create any other interesting videos that you can think of please leave some suggestions. If you like this video please please share it and also like it it really helps us
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