Oticon Launches Ruby Hearing Aid for Budget-Conscious Patients
For consumers returning to work and social activities in an uncertain economic climate, the newest addition to Oticon’s line of technology offers a combination of “sound quality, sought-after features, and affordability,” according to an announcement from the company. The new Oticon Ruby “sets a new standard in the essential category, delivering great sound quality, hassle-free rechargeability, and easy wireless connectivity in one complete solution—all within the reach of today’s budget-conscious patients.”
Powered by the Velox S platform, Oticon Ruby introduces the new SuperShield feedback management system that “helps prevent feedback before it occurs, so patients can enjoy hearing without interruptions from unwanted whistling and squealing.” For patients who want the convenience of rechargeable batteries, a new lithium-ion rechargeable option helps provide a full-day’s* charge in a few hours. Bluetooth connectivity helps enable patients to connect to smartphones and other modern devices to stream audio and music directly to their hearing aids.
“After experiencing this time of social distancing, consumers recognise the value of easy access to modern technologies to stay connected with family, friends, and business colleagues,” said Don Schum, PhD, Vice President of Audiology for Oticon, Inc. “Phone calls, video chats, and other virtual connections have become their lifeline to the world. These connections are enhanced with better hearing. At the same time, despite the start of an economic recovery, some patients may be more careful about spending. Oticon Ruby allows practitioners to offer patients looking for sought-after features, like rechargeability and easy wireless connections, a quality solution at a more affordable price.”
Like all Oticon wireless hearing aids, Oticon Ruby is compatible with Oticon RemoteCare, a new telehealth solution that allows hearing care professionals to follow up online with patients to remotely adjust and fine-tune hearing aids in a virtual appointment. For select patients who have valid audiograms, first fit with Oticon RemoteCare allows hearing care professionals to fit new hearing aids remotely.
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Oticon Ruby and all Oticon hearing aids use BrainHearing technology to “help support the brain in making sense of sound and enable patients to participate in challenging listening environments.” The Velox S platform powers the new SuperShield technology to analyse incoming sound levels, identify feedback, and prevent whistling before it occurs.
Oticon Ruby miniRITE R rechargeable hearing aids offer a full day* of power with an overnight charge. The charger helps provide a stable, reliable magnetic connection for charging that delivers power throughout the day, including streaming, with a three-hour charging time. A 30-minute recharge provides an additional six hours of power, according to Oticon.
With 2.4 GHz Bluetooth low-energy technology, Oticon Ruby helps deliver “easy wireless connectivity with low battery consumption to a wide range of devices such as smartphones, audio or music streams in stereo to both hearing aids from Bluetooth-connected mobile phones, MP3 players, PCs, and more.” Patients can pair Oticon Ruby with multiple TV Adapters and use the Oticon ON App to stream from any TV. The Oticon ON App also lets patients adjust volume, switch settings, check battery level, and access features such as Find My Hearing Aid and Oticon HearingFitness.
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Oticon Ruby is available in a full lineup of styles, including miniRITE, miniRITE T (telecoil), miniRITE R (rechargeable), BTE and BTE Power Plus, and five popular colours. Oticon Ruby is compatible with Oticon CROS hearing aids.
*Lithium-ion performance varies depending on hearing loss, lifestyle, and streaming behaviour
Source: Oticon
Image: Oticon
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A pair of biomarkers of brain function—one that represents “listening effort,” and another that measures ability to process rapid changes in frequencies—may help to explain why a person with normal hearing may struggle to follow conversations in noisy environments, according to a new study led by Massachusetts Eye and Ear researchers and summarized on the hospital’s website. Published online last week in the scientific journal eLife, the study could inform the design of next-generation clinical testing for hidden hearing loss, a condition that cannot currently be measured using standard hearing exams.
“Between the increased use of personal listening devices or the simple fact that the world is a much noisier place than it used to be, patients are reporting as early as middle age that they are struggling to follow conversations in the workplace and in social settings, where other people are also speaking in the background,” said senior study author Daniel B. Polley, PhD, director of the Lauer Tinnitus Research Center at Mass. Eye and Ear and Associate Professor of Otolaryngology Head-Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School. “Current clinical testing can’t pick up what’s going wrong with this very common problem.”
Daniel B. Polley, PhD
“Our study was driven by a desire to develop new types of tests,” added lead study author Aravindakshan Parthasarathy, PhD, an investigator in the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories at Mass. Eye and Ear. “Our work shows that measuring cognitive effort in addition to the initial stages of neural processing in the brain may explain how patients are able to separate one speaker from a crowd.”
Hearing loss affects an estimated 48 million Americans and can be caused by noise, aging, and other factors. Hearing loss typically arises from damage to the sensory cells of the inner ear (the cochlea), which convert sounds into electrical signals, and/or the auditory nerve fibers that transmit those signals to the brain. It is traditionally diagnosed by elevation in the faintest sound level required to hear a brief tone, as revealed on an audiogram, the gold standard test of hearing sensitivity.
Aravindakshan Parthasarathy, PhD
Hidden hearing loss, on the other hand, refers to listening difficulties that go undetected by conventional audiograms and are thought to arise from abnormal connectivity and communication of nerve cells in the brain and ear, not in the sensory cells that initially convert sound waves into electrochemical signals. Conventional hearing tests were not designed to detect these neural changes that interfere with our ability to process sounds at louder, more conversational levels.
In the eLife report, the study authors first reviewed more than 100,000 patient records over a 16-year period, finding that approximately 1 in 10 of these patients who visited the audiology clinic at Mass. Eye and Ear presented with complaints of hearing difficulty, yet auditory testing revealed that they had normal audiograms.
Motivated to develop objective biomarkers that might explain these “hidden” hearing complaints, the study authors developed two sets of tests. The first measured electrical EEG signals from the surface of the ear canal to capture how well the earliest stages of sound processing in the brain were encoding subtle but rapid fluctuations in sound waves. The second test used specialized glasses to measure changes in pupil diameter as subjects focused their attention on one speaker while others babbled in the background. Previous research shows changes in pupil size can reflect the amount of cognitive effort expended on a task.
They then recruited 23 young or middle-aged subjects with clinically normal hearing to undergo the tests. As expected, their ability to follow a conversation with others talking in the background varied widely despite having a clean bill of hearing health. By combining their measures of ear canal EEG with changes in pupil diameter, they could identify which subjects struggled to follow speech in noise and which subjects could ace the test. The authors are encouraged by these results, considering that conventional audiograms could not account for any of these performance differences.
“Speech is one of the most complex sounds that we need to make sense of,” Polley said. “If our ability to converse in social settings is part of our hearing health, then the tests that are used have to go beyond the very first stages of hearing and more directly measure auditory processing in the brain.”
In addition to Drs Polley and Parthasarathy, co-authors on the eLife report include Kenneth E. Hancock of Mass. Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School, Kara Bennett of Bennett Statistical Consulting, Inc, and Victor DeGruttola of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIDCD P50-DC015857).
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Starkey Launches Livio Edge AI and Several Firsts at Hearing Innovations Expo
Starkey Hearing Technologies unveiled its latest hearing aid, the Livio Edge AI, on Thursday, the opening day of the company’s Hearing Innovation Expo, held in Las Vegas and attended by a reported 3400 hearing care professionals from 60 countries. The new hearing aid—which features a 2.4 GHz custom hearing aid with rechargeability option and hands-free connectivity to new popular smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S10—will be available in North American in February 2020.
Livio AI, featured as one of TIME magazine’s Top-100 best inventions of 2019, is designed to provide exceptional sound quality and hearing in noise in addition to: serving as a fitness app by tracking the number of steps you take each day; offering a “brain health score” based on daily social engagement and active listening; using inertial sensors for fall detection and alerting caregivers; receiving voice commands so Siri can act as your mobile personal assistant; utilising pre-set timely reminders from you to take your medications; translating and transcribing 27 languages; and streaming audio from music and TV shows.
The new Livio Edge AI has been engineered to “go beyond” these features. According to presentations by Starkey CTO and EVP of Engineering Achin Bhowmik, PhD, Chief Audiology Officer Sara Burdak, AuD, and Chief Innovation Officer David Fabry, PhD, the new Livio Edge AI also includes:
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• Edge Mode applies artificial intelligence (AI) for patient-driven, on-demand fine-tuning of the sound environment. The hearing aid user can double-tap on the hearing aid to initiate Edge Mode, which through an environmental analysis of the sound can provide an “extra boost” when in challenging listening situations. A demonstration was provided of a conversation in a noisy stadium where the crowd noise was dampened so a nearby person’s comments could be heard.
• 2.4 GHz custom hearing aids with Li-ion rechargeability, reportedly an industry first. Livio Edge AI is expected to provide 23 hours of hearing and 4 hours of streaming on a 3.5 hours charge.
• Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy (including S10) phones are added to the connectivity options of smart-phones with direct streaming to the new Livio Edge AI Premium.
• Voice-activated and tap-activated commands can directly control the hearing aid by tapping and talking (ie, for increasing volume or changing listening modes). It can also provide access to Siri, the “intelligent assistant” for iPhone users. Using the Thrive Assistant feature in the Thrive app, patients have instant access to a world of information at their fingertips, getting in-ear and on-screen notifications for tasks like taking medications or a reminder to pick up milk on the way home from work.
Hearing aids Devon
Self-Check Baseline: Patient-centered care is becoming patient-driven care. With Self-Check, the patient can perform a diagnostic test of the hearing aid system anytime, on their own.
Sara Burdak and David Fabry explain the key features of Starkey’s new Table Mic.
Additionally, Starkey introduced its Table Mic, a handy remote microphone that can be placed on a table and either set to automatic mode or a manual mode where the user can direct the beamformer in up to two directions. As with other remote mics, the Table Mic is capable of improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by 12-15 dB, compared to 3-4 dB by the industry’s best digital noise reduction hearing aid algorithms.
Starkey also introduced three apps or app modifications:
• Thrive, the current user-control app for Livio AI hearing aids, has undergone a makeover designed to give it a cleaner look and feel. The new streamlined user interface is intended to make the Livio experience more transparent and easier for the hearing aid wearer.
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• ThriveCare is an app for the caregivers of the hearing aid user so they can stay informed in real-time about the user’s hearing and safety status; it is designed to provide peace of mind for care providers and to help the hearing aid wearer live independently and safely. For example, it can monitor and report on the hearing aid wearer’s number of steps, use of the hearing aids, and time spent in social interaction. Dr Fabry also pointed out that ThriveCare data can be shared with friends and colleagues who also have Livio hearing aids in order to compete in the various metrics monitored by the hearing aid.
• Balance Builder is a new app intended to help improve patients’ balance and reduce risks of falls through a series of at-home interactive exercises. The user is guided through balance exercises and workouts, based on head movements detected from sensors in Livio Edge AI hearing aids. As a “trainer” app for balance, it is designed to strengthen the user’s balance, stability, and gait, and help prevent falls and improve user confidence.
Dr Bhowmik stressed that Livio AI is—first and foremost—a hearing aid dedicated to providing the best sound experience in the hearing industry. In an interview with Hearing Review, he was careful to emphasize what shouldn’t be lost in all the new (and upcoming) features is the sound processing and the advancements made in helping people to understand spoken language. With Edge Mode, for example, the device uses AI and multiple parameters in the hearing aid that are unique to the acoustic snapshot of the current listening environment.
Looking to the Future of Healthables
“The ear is the new wrist—except better,” says Bhowmik, noting that having sensors within the ear canal opens up a wealth of possibilities for monitoring body and health-related functions, even beyond the current activity tracker and sensors found in Livio hearing aids.
Starkey CTO and EVP of Engineering Achin Bhowmik, PhD, explains Edge AI during the Starkey Hearing Innovation Expo.
Dr Bhowmik explained that several of the world’s largest companies—including Apple, Intel, IBM, Google, and Microsoft—are working on the “edge of AI.” Intelligence is moving towards edge devices with increased computing power which combine sensor data and AI algorithms that drive machine learning. “Edge AI, simply put, is an implementation of artificial intelligence that builds on distributed computing,” said Bhowmik. “We have a processor in the hearing aid itself, and we connect to the power of an iPhone or Android phone, which is connected to the Cloud [which has enormous computing power]. We connect smart devices to the smart Cloud; unlike traditional AI, where the cloud is smart, but the device not so much. To do Edge AI, we have to work with the best in the field to re-architect the AI engine—the machine infrastructure [that brings] the technology to the edge.” Bhowmik says we are seeing only the beginnings of this technology emerge today. He believes that, while other companies in the hearing industry will also start to employ this type of machine learning, Starkey will already be moving to the next level at that point.
He also offered some glimpses of “cutting-edge AI” development in the near-future, extending Livio Edge AI’s sensor-based “healthable” technology for monitoring:
• Cardiovascular health. The current Livio AI contains a heart-rate sensor; however, due to problems associated with impression-taking/earmolds and the sensor contacts, it has not been implemented yet. Starkey expects to be able to add this soon to Thrive as part of its fitness tracking. Other areas being looked into are oxygen (O2) saturation in the blood and blood pressure.
• Body temperature. A built-in sensor to monitor core body temperature.
• Visual assistance. With the help of some kind of camera or optical device, the hearing aid can identify and describe what the hearing aid wearer is seeing;
• Emotion sensing. A capability to detect if the wearer is happy, sad, depressed, relaxed, etc, and offer possible options, if needed.
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• Voice analysis. The capability for the hearing aid to “sense” if you’re feeling stressed or in need of help, and ask you discreetly if you’re in need of assistance.
Look for the upcoming report on the Starkey Innovations Expo and Hearing Review’s interview with Dr Bhowmik in a future edition of HR online news.
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Benefits of hearing aids, find out at the Honiton hearing centre. Honiton hearing are a premier independent hearing company based in Honiton, East Devon, close to Exeter. Colin Eaton, the lead audiologist is here to help you diagnose your hearing symptoms along with other hearing issues such as possible ear wax blocking the ear canal. Ear wax can be easily dealt with by Micro-suction that gently hoovers out the ear wax cleanly and quickly.
Please click here to see our Micro-suction ear wax removal video.
We also use ear irrigation using warm water and a new ear irrigation device which is very gentle on cleaning out ear wax. This sometimes is called ear syringing. Find out more here by watching our ear irrigation video.
If you need hearing aids
Hearing aids won’t make your hearing perfect, but they make sounds louder and clearer, reducing the impact hearing loss has on your life. The Benefits of hearing aids are enormous.
Hearing aids can:
help you hear everyday sounds such as the doorbell and phone
improve your ability to hear speech
make you feel more confident when talking to people and make it easier for you to follow conversations in different environments
help you to enjoy listening to music and the TV, at a volume that’s comfortable for those around you
But hearing aids only help if you still have some hearing left, so don’t put off getting help if your hearing is getting worse.
To book your appointment at the Honiton hearing centre please call reception and speak with Sam our receptionist.
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Hearing test East Devon at the Honiton Hearing Centre.
Hearing test East Devon at the Honiton Hearing Centre. We all need good hearing and that’s just a fact. Imagine not being able to hear the door bell, or hear your new grand child as they talk to you wanting to find out about Gran or Grandad. There are so many ways we need hearing in our daily life. Just talking to someone without lip reading your way through the conversation hoping to catch what they are saying so you can respond correctly. It can be stressful not being included in what is going on around you.
Honiton hearing can help, we are specialist hearing care practitioners with many years in the hear care business. Colin Eaton is a specialist in ear wax removal and dispensing hearing aids after the comprehensive hearing test known to man kind in Devon. If your ears are clear of wax and after the hearing test Colin will sit with you and explain carefully what he has found regards your hearing. He will show you on a screen the test results so you are in complete control of your next move.
With knowledge of the hearing results Colin will then guide you on what hearing aid or aids are best suited to your hearing needs. It maybe after the hearing test you don’t actually need hearing aids. Knowledge is a good thing either way. Just like eye examinations, hearing tests are just as much needed when you reach a certain age. If you think you may benefit from a hearing test then please book an appointment with Sam on reception or use the booking form here to make a booking.
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