SOMERSET, NJ April 23 –Oticon continues to expand the possibilities for Oticon Opn™ to benefit people with hearing loss and the hearing care professionals who serve them. At the 2018 American Academy of Audiology Annual Conference in Nashville, Oticon shared early results of studies that compared listening effort in normal hearing listeners with the listening effort of Opn 1 users. The results show that with OpenSound Navigator™, it is possible for people with hearing loss to engage in active communication in noisy situations, such as restaurants, where they may have given up in the past. Visitors to the Oticon exhibit also previewed a range of new and not-yet-released innovations including the HearingFitness™ App, winner of a 2018 CES Innovation Award; RemoteCare™, an innovative e-health service concept that will be piloted in 2018; and the just-launched ConnectClip, the newest addition to the comprehensive range of Oticon connectivity devices.
New Study Explores Listening Effort & Giving Up
Oticon hearing instruments with BrainHearing™ technology are designed to support the hard work the brain does. BrainHearing lessens the mental effort required to understand speech in noise and helps to preserve the mental resources needed to engage in brain-stimulating activities. New evidence previewed at the 2018 AAA Conference shows Opn hearing aids with OpenSound Navigator reduce listening effort significantly, making communication less exhausting and moving the ‘giving up’ point for when a person with hearing loss starts to give up, enabling them to participate actively in more social situations.
“Two studies, using similar methodology but different populations - normal hearing listeners and listeners with hearing loss – appear to indicate that OpenSound Navigator empowers people with hearing loss to participate in social situations similar to their normal hearing peers,” explains Don Schum, PhD, Vice President of Audiology for Oticon, Inc. “This is an important finding and one that we can use to encourage people with hearing loss to explore difficult listening situations where they may have given up in the past, such as social gatherings or noisy restaurants.”
Innovation for the Future
Oticon BrainHearing technology is at the core of several new innovations under development at Oticon.
The Oticon HearingFitness™ App, the first hearing aid app dedicated to hearing fitness, will track hearing aid use, listening environments and other behavior, gathering and collating data with measurements of heart rate, sleep patterns and other health markers from other wearable devices. The award-winning technology will give Opn users advice and encouragement on ways to hear better, protect their hearing and stay healthier.
Oticon is readying the RemoteCare e-health service for pilot testing later this year. Easy to integrate into day-to-day practice, RemoteCare aims to make it more convenient for patients to connect with practitioners by moving follow-up meetings to face-to-face online sessions. In addition to helping to improve success rates for adaptation, hearing care professionals save time so they can see more patients and increase their customer base geographically by reducing the need to travel for follow-up care.
Hands-free Communication for Adults & Teens
Oticon ConnectClip is designed to improve listening and communication experiences for Oticon Opn users. The discreet intermediary device turns Opn hearing aids into a high quality wireless headset for clear, hands-free calls from modern mobile phones, including iPhone® and Android™ smartphones. At AAA, participants learned how the multi-functional device can benefit teens in classrooms and other academic or social settings. When used as a remote/partner microphone, ConnectClip provides improved intelligibility of the speaker or educator wearing it, either at a distance (up to 65 feet), in very noisy environments, such as classrooms or lecture halls, or in a combination of the two.
For more information about BrainHearing, the expanding Oticon Opn family and new ConnectClip, visitwww.Oticon.com/Opn or the Oticon Partners Page on AudiologyOnline.
Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple Watch are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc. Android, Google Play, and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google Inc.
