Hi there I'm emma from Value Hearing i'm a clinical audiologist and today's video
is just a very quick video to let you guys know how we're tracking with the Oticon More.
So i did post a video in December telling you how we at Value Hearing had found out
that oticon were about to sneakily release a new hearing aid after almost five years and that it
looked very very exciting because they were doing something really quite different from the other
manufacturers in the sense that they're using artificial intelligence and machine learning in
a different way so artificial intelligence and machine learning have been in our industry in
some form for a long time but what they're doing is using a deep neural network that's actually
onboard in the hearing aids now what that means in real language is just they're going to have a
particularly powerful accurate hearing aid that is not necessarily going to rely on traditional
directional microphones and noise reduction like all the others are in the industry and what we've
been using for decades now in order to help people hear speech in background noise so we have only
had the hearing aids available for a couple of weeks we have had a bit of training on them and
some insight into them but we've really only had them in the field for a very short period of time
on a few trial people a few guinea pigs of ours that have used other hearing aid manufacturers
some of the premium ones and are experienced users so can give us some really good feedback
and so far we've had some really positive comments such as they sound more natural
a bit more sharp and clear we've heard that this streaming sound quality is considerably better,
generally the clients are saying that they prefer them to the other hearing aids.
How they're going in background noise, the jury is still out in terms of how well they're hearing
speech we've still got some more appointments that we need to do some fine tuning and honestly
we really do need to get more clients and more opportunities for these clients to try
the hearing aids in more challenging environments which is not that easy in the middle of a pandemic
here in australia we're definitely being probably a lot more social than we are in the US and the UK
unfortunately but we're still not quite in noisy environments as often as we used to be but we will
keep you informed of how that's going i have been told by a client that he does think
he heard better in a very noisy situation than he did with some of their competitors
but he still thinks the background noise was pretty loud he could hear the conversation but he
was quite surprised how loud the noise was but we still got some fine tuning to do or a bit of time
to get used to the new processing with him there. For usIn the clinic we are doing a little test
ourselves it's a very small sample size with our clients that we're fitting with the oticon more
we're just testing how well they process the speech and noise for them when they're wearing
the oticon more it's not a great test for other hearing aids because other hearing aids
are relying more on directional microphones and in this particular setup
the speech and the noise is coming from one direction whereas directional microphones like
it when it is coming from a different direction obviously with oticon they've obviously claimed
look we don't necessarily need to rely on directional microphones to do that anymore
because we've got this highly trained deep neural network that knows pretty much what your client
wants to hear and what they don't want to hear and we can you know play with that contrast for them
so we thought well it would be interesting to see how Oticon More copes with that test that we know
that other hearing aids doesn't cope well with and we have to say the numbers are looking positive
that there's definitely an improvement they're definitely doing what they say they're doing when
it comes to not just relying on directional microphones and classic noise reduction to
improve the signal to noise ratio so it'll be interesting to see, we do need to have more data
and a much bigger sample size there we obviously want to do more testing where the speech and noise
is coming from different directions in the clinic as well so we will definitely keep you updated but
it looks like it isn't just hype that it wasn't just marketing from Oticon but i don't want to
say for sure yet i need more clients and more opportunities more types of hearing loss etc
etc to try it out for you but we will definitely keep you informed and really excitingly we have
someone from Oticon who is going to be allowing me to interview him and ask questions on our clients
behalf so if you have any questions for oticon about Oticon in general about the Oticon More
please leave a little comment in the box below with your questions and we will definitely pass
those along so thank you so much for watching if you like this content like and share the video
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