- In this video I'm gonna show you how movement
can help you hear better in dynamic listening environments.
Coming up.
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Hi guys, Cliff Olson, doctor of audiology
and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions
in Phoenix, Arizona and I cover
a bunch of hearing related information to help make you
a better informed consumer.
So if you're into that,
make sure you hit that subscribe button
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Some hearing aids have advanced to the point
where they can process over 550 million
operations per second.
In fact, every time that hearing aid manufacturers
release new hearing aid technology,
I always question how it's possible to improve
on the technology that came before it.
Now, I know that this is how technology works.
As soon as a new hearing aid is released,
engineers are already hard at work
trying to develop new features that they're going to be
rolling out in their next generation of devices,
but with hearing aids working as well as they currently do,
what could there possibly be left to improve upon?
Well, the answer to this may lie in how well
a hearing aid can process sound
when there's body movement involved.
For instance, when you're sitting down
at a table talking to someone,
your listening needs are completely different
than if you're up and walking around.
Typically when you're sitting down,
you're trying to focus on the speech of the person
who's right in front of you.
However, if you're up walking around
you typically aren't always facing the person
that you're trying to hear
and if there are environmental sounds around you,
you want to be aware of those as well.
The problem is hearing aids
typically only utilize acoustic information
from your surrounding environment to determine
how to orient your directional microphones
and enabled digital noise reduction features.
They do this to maximize your signal to noise ratio,
basically meaning emphasizing speech
and reducing background noise.
Having access to only acoustic information
in order to determine how to apply these settings
could put you at a disadvantage
if there's movement involved.
Fortunately Phonak, today's video sponsor,
has now incorporated motion sensors
inside of the rechargeable Audeo Paradise hearing aids
in order to identify your body movement.
Not only does the motion sensor allow
for one of the coolest hearing aid features
that I've seen in a long time, called tap control,
which I do have a video about
that I will link in the description,
but it also works behind the scenes to help you
hear better when there's movement involved.
Let me give you an example of how this works.
Imagine that you're in a noisy restaurant,
sitting at a table with a friend of yours.
Because it's noisy and because you're not
moving around a lot 'cause you're sitting at a table,
your hearing aids have identified that they need
to orient the microphones directly towards your friend
and enable noise reduction features
to try to reduce the amount of background noise
next to you and behind you.
Enter the motion sensor.
The reason the motion sensor is so great is
because it's constantly working behind the scenes
in order to determine the directional pickup
of the microphones on your hearing aids.
When the motion sensors identify
that you're sitting at a table,
it tells the hearing aids to orient
the microphones forward towards your friend
using narrow directional beam forming technology
so you can primarily understand your friend when they talk.
However, when you stand up to leave that table,
the motion sensors can identify that you're moving
so it tells the hearing aids
to start picking up sounds from around you.
So if you're walking next to your friend,
you can still hear them and understand them
without looking at them.
The same type of thing can happen
when you're walking on a sidewalk along a busy street
because there's so much background noise,
normally your hearing aids would go
into a directional microphone mode,
picking up sounds primarily in front of you.
This will reduce your awareness of sounds around you,
which can not only be inconvenient,
it can also be dangerous.
In this situation, even though it's noisy,
motion sensors can tell your hearing aids
that you're on the move,
so they keep the hearing aid microphones open and active
so you have better situational awareness.
If you happen to stop at a crosswalk
and face your friend to have a conversation,
the hearing aids will once again be able to go
into directional pickup mode so you can focus
primarily on their voice and not
all of these other sounds around you.
The fact that you do you do not have to manually manipulate
the programming of your hearing aids
because the motion sensors do it for you,
makes your listening experience very seamless.
Not only do the motion sensors help you hear better
in these situations that involve movement,
they can actually help you localize sound better as well.
Localization is basically your brain's ability
to identify which direction sound is coming from
and it requires time and intensity differences of sound
between your ears for it to function properly.
By allowing your hearing aids to pick up sounds
from all different directions while you're on the move,
the motion sensors can better maintain
these time and intensity differences between your ears
to allow you to have better localization ability.
Now, all this talk about how motion sensors work
and how beneficial they are is great
but do motion sensors actually lead
to better user satisfaction?
Well, according to a study from the University of Toronto,
researchers identified that nearly three quarters
of their test subjects preferred their ability
to understand speech with motion sensors active.
Not only did they prefer speech with motion sensors active
they also showed a strong preference
for environmental awareness in their ability
to localize where sound was coming from
when the motion sensors were active as well.
Nearly three quarters of users also rated
their overall listening experience to be better
with motion sensors on versus off.
This means that not only do motion sensors
make sense in theory,
they actually result in a higher level of performance
than the same devices without active motion sensors.
At the end of the day, it would appear
as the one of the answers to the question
what could they possibly do to improve
modern hearing aid technology would apparently be
putting motion sensors inside of the hearing aids
in order for them to be able to identify your body movement.
And the best part is you don't even have to do anything.
The motion sensors are always working behind the scenes
inside of the hearing aids so you can focus on
living in the moment instead of adjusting your hearing aids.
So if you're the type of person
who likes to move around a lot
and you wanna be able to hear,
you may wanna consider a set of hearing aids
that has motion sensors that can help you out.
That's it for this video.
If you have any questions,
leave them in the comment section below.
If you liked the video, please share it.
If you wanna see other videos just like this one,
go ahead and hit that subscribe button.
Also feel free to check out my website, Dr.CliffAuD.com.
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