- Hi guys, Cliff Olson,
Doctor of Audiology and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions
in Phoenix, Arizona.
And in this video,
I'm talking about three
of the most difficult listening situations
if you have a hearing loss
and what you can do with hearing aids
to help you hear much better in them.
Coming up.
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I want you to take a second to think of that one situation
that you always seem to have difficulty hearing in.
Chances are you don't have to spend that much time
thinking about it
because it's a situation that you encounter
all the time.
After nearly 10 years of working with patients
who have hearing loss,
I've identified certain situations
that nearly everybody has difficulty with,
no matter what type of hearing loss you have.
In fact, there are three situations
that get reported so frequently
that I would bet that you experience difficulty
in at least one of them.
But before I get into
what these three challenging situations are
and what you can do to fix them,
if you could do me a huge favor and click the like button,
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Now let's get into those challenging environments.
The first challenge that I'm going to discuss
is being able to clearly understand the television.
The TV can be hit or miss.
Sometimes all you need to do is increase the volume
or turn on closed captions,
and you have the problem solved.
However, not only does turning up the volume of the TV
drive other people in your household absolutely crazy,
it can also create a phenomenon
called upward spread of masking,
which is where the low frequency sounds
that you do not need more of
end up masking over the high frequency sounds
that typically give you the perception of clarity.
That's why when you increase the volume,
you're like, well, this is getting louder,
but it's not that much more clear.
Closed captions are usually the result
of an annoyed family member
who does not want to damage their own hearing
just so you can hear the TV marginally better.
Which means that you will no longer
be watching your favorite TV show,
you're going to be reading your favorite TV show.
The second difficult listening situation
that I constantly hear
is having difficulty understanding speech on the telephone.
The telephone is unique in the sense that
you do not get to see visual cues
by looking at the mouth of the person talking to you,
and you only get to use one ear,
unless you want to broadcast that telephone call
for everyone else to hear.
Using visual cues to help you fill in the gaps of sounds
that you cannot naturally hear
helps you understand speech significantly better.
And you've probably experienced this
now that people have been wearing masks due to the pandemic.
And only being able to use one ear
while you're talking on the phone
makes things more difficult as well
because the human brain understands speech better
when both ears can participate
in the listening task at the same time.
Combine these two reasons for increased difficulty,
along with someone who has a really heavy accent,
and it is a recipe for complete disaster
when trying to understand someone on the telephone.
The third challenging listening situation,
and clearly the most often reported
is hearing in a noisy restaurant.
The reason why restaurants are so tough
is due to several things.
First of all, there's a lot of noise in restaurants.
Second of all,
you have a lot of reverberation and echo
inside of these restaurants
that typically have poor acoustics and on top of that,
you're trying to hear usually multiple people
who are at the same table as you at the same time
and you're even trying to hear
a server who's coming up to you,
who probably is still wearing a face mask.
All of these factors combined
make hearing in a noisy situation like a restaurant,
the number one most frequently reported
challenging listening situation.
And I would venture to say
that there is a high likelihood that you agree
that this is the most challenging environment
that you would ever find yourself in.
Struggling with any one
of these challenging listening situations is bad enough,
but if you happen to struggle in all three of them,
then you really need hearing aids
that can help you out as much as humanly possible.
The good news is Oticon, today's video sponsor,
has addressed all three
of these challenging listening situations
with the development of their new Oticon More™
line of hearing aids.
The Oticon More™ hearing aid
was specifically designed to address
nearly all of the challenging listening situations
that you may encounter as a hearing aid user.
Let's go down the list of these challenging situations
one by one, starting with the television.
The goal for watching TV is to have the TV
at a reasonable volume for everyone else in the room,
but then having your hearing aids
specifically programmed to amplify the sounds
that you need more of to give you better clarity.
To accomplish this, the Oticon More™
has up to 24 adjustment bands
to allow your hearing care professional
to specifically amplify the frequencies
that you need more of,
so you can get more clarity out of the TV,
not just more volume out of the TV.
Think of these 24 different adjustment bands
as being like an equalizer
that your hearing care professional can use,
just like an audio producer
to make things sound exactly the way that they want.
This prevents that issue that I talked about before
called upward spread of masking,
which makes the TV louder but not clearer
and makes it so you can understand dialogue
much more clearly,
even if there's some background sounds
going on at the same time.
If this level of programming precision
that can be obtained with the Oticon More™ hearing aids
is still not enough to overcome
the poor quality of speakers on your TV,
or just bad acoustics in your TV room,
then you can use the TV Streamer,
to take audio directly from your TV
and send it wirelessly
into both of your Oticon More™ hearing aids,
and that will solve the problem entirely.
Okay, so we solved the problem with the TV
using the Oticon More™ hearing aids,
but how do the Oticon More™ hearing aids
help you solve the problem of understanding speech better
on the telephone?
This problem is easily solved
by the Oticon More™ hearing aids as well,
because you can directly connect
your Oticon More™ hearing aids to your smartphone.
That way, the person that you're talking to on the phone,
their voice gets streamed
directly into your ears wirelessly,
so you can hear them in both ears at the same time,
which we all know gives you better speech intelligibility.
The Oticon More™ hearing aid uses Bluetooth Low Energy,
which means that it's made for iPhone,
but it also uses the ASHA Bluetooth Protocol,
which means that you can use your Oticon More™ hearing aids
with an Android phone as well.
If you want to be completely hands-free,
the Oticon More™ hearing aid is compatible
with the Oticon ConnectClip.
So you can use the ConnectClip to pick up your own voice
to send to your phone
if you want to keep your phone in your pocket.
Okay, TV, check.
Telephone, check.
Now let's go ahead and talk about perhaps
the most challenging listening situation
that anyone would ever encounter,
which is a noisy environment like a restaurant.
When it comes to hearing better in these noisy situations,
the Oticon More™ hearing aid uses deep learning
to help it better separate speech
from the background noise.
Now, if you have not yet heard about deep learning,
get ready to hear about it a lot,
because I believe that deep learning
is going to completely revolutionize
the way that engineers design hearing aids
to process sound in the future.
In order to create a hearing aid that uses deep learning,
Oticon had to develop a deep neural network
and train it with over 12 million unique sound samples
so it could identify the unique characteristics
of speech and non speech sounds.
The results is a hearing aid that can precisely identify
the characteristics that make speech speech
and the characteristics that make noise noise.
And it's not limited
to the limited capacity of an audio engineer
to identify the specific characteristics of these sounds
inside of a manmade algorithm.
All this simply means is that
when you go into a noisy situation like a restaurant,
the Oticon More hearing aid uses this deep learning
to help you understand speech better,
even though there's background noise.
In fact, the Oticon More hearing aid that uses deep learning
gives you access to 30% more sound
and 15% better speech understanding
than the previous Oticon Opn S™ hearing aids
that were fantastic hearing aids in their own right.
Now, if you want to learn more about deep learning
and deep neural networks,
then I highly recommend that you check out
my review video that I will have linked in the description.
Of course, if one of the world's most advanced hearing aids
that uses deep learning to help you hear better
in a background noise situation is still not enough,
then I also recommend that you check out
the Oticon ConnectClip,
which will help you overcome background noise situations
even better.
I do have a review video of that particular device as well.
So whether it's trying to hear the TV better,
trying to hear on the telephone better,
or just trying to hear
in a really nasty, noisy environment better,
the Oticon More line of hearing aids
really has you covered.
When it comes right down to it,
there are certain situations
that you may find more challenging than others.
You may find the ones that I just talked about
to be the ones that are most challenging for you,
or you may have other situations
that you find to be more challenging as well.
Your job is to identify
what your challenging listening situations are
and share them with your hearing care professional,
so you guys can collaborate and identify
what the best hearing aid is for you to overcome them.
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 want to see other videos just like this one,
go ahead and hit that subscribe button.
Also feel free to check out my website,
DrCliffAuD.com.
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