hi there welcome to value hearings 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 open 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
so 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 more is referring to their completely new way of approaching sound processing so if you
look at oticon's website at all you will know that they are very into something called brain hearing
so they've put a lot of time a lot of effort and actually a lot of research into how the brain
works with processing science and understanding environments so their whole focus has been since
even the last platform they released in open has been on brain hearing so supporting your brain
to understand and adjust to sounds better not about always prioritizing speech over noise but
allowing you to understand speech over noise but still appreciate the sounds around you and to an
extent open definitely seem to achieve that this hearing aid 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
so 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 um of artificial intelligence in that it is
a network a neural network that can learn from experience it's 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 no commercially available
hearing aid has done this before i have no doubt there are other manufacturers doing it right now
but oticons seem to be the first one to have released it so what they've done this deep
neural network has been used to be trained in 12 million different sign 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 sign 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 sign 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's 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 so the normal hearing brain does a lot of work with
the sound that 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 signs what are the nature what's
important what isn't important to me what do i want to filter right what's what do i want to
focus on and that can change from second to second um 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 so 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 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 um 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 otacom 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 so there is already a list online of what phones are compatible with the
oticon more hearing aids so we'll put that in the link below in the description um so that's what we
know so far we basically know that they're turning the industry on its head by the signs 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 otocon has something new we generally tread quite carefully because um
they can make a feature that has been used by another hearing aid manufacturer even
by themselves sound really exciting and new and groundbreaking um and often it's it's just being
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 we see the data and more so 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 um
it looks like what they're saying is they're 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 open as well so time will only tell
very interesting times we're living in 2020s being a big one for the hearing aid industry
what we'll do when we get the training next week if anything is really groundbreaking or
if anything i've said in this video turns out not to be accurate we'll make another video to let you
know and definitely as we have done with the other hearing aids that have been released this year
when we've fitted a few we'll definitely give you an update on what the feedback has been so far
but any questions any comments just leave them in the little box below for us
if you liked this content please like and share the video definitely subscribe to our channel if
you haven't already it really helps increase our reach on youtube thank you so much for watching