New Balance in Hearing: Gaia Hearing Aids Balance Speech Intelligibility and Listening Comfort

Somerset, NJ, April 2 - Oticon, Inc. today introduced Gaia, a fully digital hearing instrument that offers a new balance in hearing by combining speech intelligibility and comfortable sound quality in one quality instrument. Gaia features the unique Gaia Sound System, a new amplification strategy from Oticon that consists of a proprietary comfort-based rationale and a set of dedicated sound quality enhancing features, built around OpenEar Acoustics™. The result is a hearing instrument designed to satisfy the needs of experienced users and to provide new users with a smoother adjustment period.

"With Gaia, new hearing aid users will explore and enjoy better hearing, without dealing with many of the side effects that are often associated with wearing hearing aids," stated Mikael Worning, president of Oticon, Inc. "Experienced hearing aid users will instantly notice and appreciate the benefits that OpenEar Acoustics provides including relief from occlusion and feedback."

The Gaia rationale is a comfort rationale, developed to make a wide range of speech audible to users while preserving loudness comfort in both quiet and noisy situations. Gaia also offers a choice between ASA2, NAL-NL 1, and DSL i/o rationales for increased fitting flexibility.

Gaia features Oticon's proven OpenEar Acoustics™ with its effective Dynamic Feedback Cancellation technology that enables increased vent size. In addition to reducing or eliminating occlusion, this system preserves the important characteristics of more natural hearing, making it easier for first time users to adapt to their new hearing aids.

The Gaia product family ranges from very discrete CICs to compact BTEs. ITEs and BTEs are available with manual override or directionality to ensure maximum flexibility. Two programs are standard for all BTEs and optional for ITE styles.

For more information on Gaia and Oticon, Inc. please log on to www.gaia.oticonus.com.

For more information on Oticon click here.