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Hearing Aid Sales And Job Satisfaction Go Hand-In-Hand As Unitron Is Named One Of Canada’s 50 Best Small and Medium Employers

I’ve worked with hundreds of high-tech companies in my consulting career. By and large, their corporate cultures are focused less on the long-term job satisfaction of their employees than on having them work as many hours as it takes to achieve peak performance every day in a never-ending, constantly accelerating race to stay ahead of equally fast-moving competitors.

But ever since I’ve been involved with the hearing aid industry, I’ve seen a different side of the high-tech equation — companies and employees united by a mission and common social purpose.

The hearing aid industry is loaded with as much technology as any of the fast-moving hardware and software companies in Silicon Valley, and it’s got its share of die-hard competitors. Nevertheless, job satisfaction is generally very high.

If you want to know why, you should read the press release Unitron put out this month on being named one of Canada’s 50 Best Small and Medium Employers for the third year in a row:

“It is a terrific reflection of the spirit of the people who work at Unitron and the culture we collectively foster,” says Jan Metzdorff, President, Unitron. “We have the great privilege to work on products and technologies that make a real difference in lives of people with hearing loss. The highly personal nature of what we do gives our employees a shared purpose and common goal, which we see reflected in our survey results and in our ranking as a top 50 employer.”

The competitive study by Queen’s School of Business, Queen’s Centre for Business Venturing and Aon Hewitt, identified 21 key drivers influencing employee perceptions of their work experience, including people, work/motivation, opportunities, procedures, total rewards, quality of life/values, and corporate and social responsibility.

Among other things, the award recognizes Unitron’s recent investment in corporate social responsibility programs, including the Unitron Community Connection, an employee-led charity which has donated thousands of hearing aids to children around the world and raised more than $100,000 to provide hearing dog guides through the Lions Foundation of Canada.

Now That Neurotone Has Put Its LACE Listening Training Software Online, There’s No Excuse Not To Use It

Have you ever had trouble understanding your dinner partners in a noisy restaurant? Neurotone’s new web version of its popular auditory training software, LACE Online, may be just what you need.

LACE is a proven method of training your brain to better understand speech in challenging listening environments. Now that it’s directly accessible on the web, with an attractive $79 retail price ($59 if you take advantage of the limited time introductory offer), it may be the easiest and least expensive investment you’ll ever make to achieve better hearing.

Neurotone has long marketed the LACE software to audiologists, who use it to help new hearing-aid users better cope with their hearing loss. No matter how big a help the hearing aids may be, developing effective listening skills is equally important in understanding speech and keeping up with conversations.

I went through the original DVD-based LACE training a few years ago, and it quickly improved my ability to understand speech in noise. Taking me through a series of listening exercises — tracking conversations in noisy settings, trying to understand one speaker when two people are talking, keeping up with a fast talker, learning to retain key words in sentences to improve contextual understanding — the program tracked and documented my improvement over more than a week of training.

Research at the University of California in San Francisco that led to the development of LACE demonstrated that auditory cognition — your brain’s ability to comprehend speech in noise — can dramatically improve with training. When you couple auditory training with a technical assist from hearing aids, the improvement in hearing is far more dramatic than depending on the hearing aids by themselves.

As a result, audiologists who prescribe LACE along with hearing aids get fewer complaints about the hearing aids not working, because patients are doing their part to make them work. And follow-up visits for programming improvements are more successful, because patients learn to be conscious of the kinds of amplification that will help them most in understanding speech.

Independent researchers have documented improvements of up to 40 percent in difficult listening situations. The latest evidence comes from a Northwestern University study that concluded:

Trained subjects exhibited significant improvements in speech-in-noise perception that were retained 6 months later….We provide the first demonstration that short-term training can improve the neural representation of cues important for speech-in-noise perception. These results implicate and delineate biological mechanisms contributing to learning success, and they provide a conceptual advance to our understanding of the kind of training experiences that can influence sensory processing in adulthood.

LACE training speeds up what works naturally to a greater or lesser degree for all people with hearing loss: over time, your brain learns to compensate for diminished ability to hear by zeroing in on verbal cues that enable you to catch more meaning from less comprehensible sound.

When I got my first pair of hearing aids, my audiologist took me for a walk outside to show me what they could and couldn’t do. In addition to pointing out the sounds I hadn’t been hearing (birds singing), she walked me through the Mass General cafeteria at lunch hour and told me all the things my hearing aids wouldn’t do for me — especially amplifying a noisy environment and thus making it more difficult, not easier, to hear.

But then she said, “Come back in six months, and you’ll be surprised at how much better you hear, not just because you’ll get used to your hearing aids, but because your brain constantly adjusts and helps you get better at understanding.” Sure enough, she was right. Six months later I went to the same cafeteria with a friend, and conversation was much, much easier. My brain really had gradually gotten a lot better at processing speech in noise. However, I’m convinced if LACE had been available then and I’d gone through the program right away, I would have reached the same level of comprehension in days or a couple of weeks instead of six months.

LACE Online makes it a lot easier to access auditory training than earlier versions, which came on DVDs and CD-ROMs, and it performs extremely well. One of the challenges of a highly interactive online site with a lot of audio and video is to deliver response times fast enough to keep up with the user’s pace through the program. LACE Online met all my expectations for immediate response times, not only with my high-bandwidth fiber connection to my desktop, but also when I used the much slower 3G wireless data connection with my iPad2 (LACE Online doesn’t depend on Flash, so all the videos run beautifully on the iPad).

Another challenge with interactive online training sites is the user interface, but LACE Online is intuitive and simple to navigate. Plus they’ve paid special attention to hard-of-hearing customers who depend on speech-reading: in the videos featuring Robert W. Sweetow, PhD, the clinical professor of otolaryngology and director of audiology at UCSF Medical Center whose research provided much of the foundation for LACE, Dr. Sweetow enunciates and shapes his words slowly and carefully enough to be helpful to even the newest speech reader.

I’ve just finished the first and second of 11 days of training with LACE Online, and I’m finding it’s a great refresher from my original run through the program. And going through the easy interactive lessons again reminded me that LACE is not just for people with hearing aids. The LACE training can help virtually anyone who’s ever had a problem understanding their companions in a noisy restaurant — which means it could help just about everyone.

If You Were A Major Hearing Aid Company And Got A Half-Billion Dollar Windfall, What Would You Do With It?

If you were one of the world’s largest hearing-aid companies and suddenly received a half-billion dollar windfall, what would you do with it? That’s exactly the position GN Store Nord finds itself in today.

The parent of GN ReSound hearing aids and GN Netcom headsets will get 550 million Euros (approximately $530 million US) after prevailing in a long-standing civil dispute with Poland’s largest telecommunications company. In the Bloomberg News summary of the settlement, GN Store Nord executives indicated they will use the money primarily to make further investments in its ReSound hearing aid business, including potential acquisitions.

That amount of new money unleashed on a global industry that is less than $20 billion in total sales could have a major impact. But if GN ReSound just acquires another hearing-aid company, it won’t be the game-changer everyone is waiting for in a global industry that’s been stuck with less than five percent annual growth for the past decade. Here are some other areas where serious investment could get the hearing aid industry growing faster:

1. Develop More Affordable Hearing Aids: Most of the recent innovation by the global market leaders in the hearing aid business has been in the high end of the market, providing expensive features such as wireless communication to their highest paying customers. It would be great to see one of the five global leaders come up with a high-quality hearing aid for entry level users that retails for less than $1,000. Component prices are low enough to get there, but such a low price point will also require innovation and investment in the retail channel to speed up and lower the cost of fitting the hearing aids while maintaining high levels of customer service.
2. Streamline the Fitting Process: Making it faster and easier for audiologists and dispensers to fit hearing aids will enable them to serve more customers and offer lower prices, making up a lower profit margin with a higher volume of sales. Sonova’s Sona hearing aid brand is an attempt to lower stocking costs with an upgradeable product platform to accelerate the fitting process for customers with mild hearing loss, but so far it hasn’t had a huge impact on the overall market. Others are working on faster, easier and less invasive hearing tests that would provide better results than today’s lengthy procedure while lowering costs and making it easier to attract more hearing-aid users, especially at the entry level of the market. The industry could use a lot more investment in those kinds of experiments. But until they result in higher sales volumes, these experiments require long-term investment.
3. Integrate Seamlessly With Third-Party Peripherals: The major recent investments by the top hearing aid companies in wireless communication with peripherals to hook up your hearing aids with your Bluetooth phone or your TV audio have not yet delivered affordable solutions. Many of the wireless communications schemes are proprietary, locking the user into one manufacturer’s brand of hearing aids and commanding premium prices. More compatibility with industry standards and more integration with third-party peripherals and assistive listening devices will expand the market by serving more customers at more affordable prices. But it requires an investment in innovations that will lower costs, not just provide new or higher performance.

Those are only three areas where even a fraction of a half-billion-dollar investment could be a game changer for the hearing aid industry. Unfortunately, all those investments require a long-term focus and staying power, because results won’t be obvious overnight. So don’t be surprised if we see the kind of short-term investment activity that gets immediate results and keeps shareholders happy instead. A couple of quick acquisitions of smaller hearing aid companies could reduce overall back office costs, enlarge share of market, and improve profits in short order.

But if acquisitions and other short-term investments don’t result in new products, new thinking, or new ways of reaching and serving new market segments–especially the millions of entry-level consumers with mild untreated hearing loss–then we’ll see more of the same in the hearing aid industry. Big players will continue to get bigger by serving the high end of the market. Only by taking the risk to invest in new products and services that could broaden the market with more affordable solutions will we see a step increase in growth rates in the global hearing aid industry.

Newly Renamed Starkey Hearing Technologies Plans To Keep Putting New Wine In New Bottles

Sometimes when a company changes its name, the first thing you think is “old wine in new bottles.” But when Starkey Laboratories, the 45-year-old hearing aid company, today announced its name change to Starkey Hearing Technologies, it reflected how far the company has come in recent years. It also sent a strong signal on where the company is going–toward a future focused on developing new hearing technologies and integrating them into multiple brands of new hearing products for big consumer markets.

In recent years, Starkey has emerged as one of the top five global hearing aid companies, with nearly a billion dollars of sales from a broad line of products that meet consumers’ entire range of hearing needs. Its five hearing aid brands–Audibel, AudioSync, NuEar, MicroTech and the original Starkey brand–are increasingly driven by a common platform of new technologies in digital signal processing, sound processing, miniaturization, wireless connectivity to your phone, TV and other devices, and wireless binaural communication between hearing aids for a more natural balanced sound.

“Over the past decade, we have gone from a manufacturing company to a global technology company,” Jerry Ruzicka, President of Starkey Hearing Technologies, said in a news release. “The name change better aligns with both who we are as an organization, as well as our focus on innovation, technology and the diverse customers we serve.”

Starkey was founded in Minnesota by William Austin, who has devoted more time in recent years to philanthropy. His Starkey Hearing Foundation to date has given away more than 500,000 hearing aids to people in need in the U.S. and around the world, with a commitment to giving away more than 100,000 hearing aids annually and a goal of one million more this decade. In the meantime, Starkey’s new generation of operating leadership has poured money into R&D and new-product development, and the results are starting to make a big impact on hearing-industry markets.

Once known more for its sales strength than leadership in innovation, in recent years Starkey caught up to and in many instances surpassed other leading hearing-aid manufacturers in developing and promoting hot new technologies. Just this week the company’s new AMP “invisible” hearing aid is being honored at the International Consumer Electronics Show with a 2012 Innovations Design and Engineering Award.

But the newly named Starkey Hearing Technologies won’t be able to rest on its laurels, or its name change, to continue competing successfully in the increasingly competitive global high-end hearing technology industry, where all the leaders are driving the advanced technologies in their hearing aids into consumer products for markets such as high-tend audio, Bluetooth phones, headsets and earphones, and wireless devices.

Industry leader Sonova Group, whose Phonak brand has been both a technology and a marketing leader for years, has continued to drive innovation in sound processing and wireless technologies. GN Store Nord, parent of ReSound hearing aids, also has a Netcom headset division that is driving into industrial hearing protection and consumer markets for earphones and headsets including the popular Jabra bluetooth phone earpieces. And Oticon hearing-aid parent William Demant’s similar push into consumer hearing technologies is led by its high-end Sennheiser headsets and other well-known audio brands.

Cochlear Implant Failure Rates Appear To Be Low In Spite Of Recalls

Results of a study published in the December issue of Archives of Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery, found that rates of cochlear implant failures in a sample of Canadian children implanted between 1990 and 2010 were less than three percent. It’s one of the few studies I’ve seen that attempts to show how reliable cochlear implants are, and according to the authors of the study, the findings indicate a very low failure rate in spite of publicity over the past two years about cochlear implant product recalls.

Advanced Bionics had a major recall starting in 2010 that kept its leading cochlear implant product line off the market well into 2011, and in October 2011 Cochlear Ltd. announced a voluntary recall of its main implant line after reports of a small percentage of failures in past implanted units. When it announced the recall, Cochlear Ltd.’s share price fell 20 percent, but when it announced in late December it discovered the cause of the product failures, the share price bounced back.

Even though the first cochlear implants were developed decades ago, and even with the enormous progress we’ve seen in their ability to restore hearing, we are still early in the game when it comes to performance of the systems and improvements in implantation techniques. It’s good to see both Cochlear Ltd. and Advanced Bionics voluntarily recalled their products when they discovered problems in a small fraction of devices that had been implanted, rather than waiting for regulators to blow the whistle.

If the three major global players can stay on top of the inevitable problems that arise and continue improving the products and performance at the rate they have over the past decade, we can expect to see a lot more deafened children and adults getting their hearing back.

Advanced Bionics Takes The Plunge With Waterproof Neptune Cochlear Implant Sound Processor

Advanced Bionics (AB), the cochlear implant maker owned by Sonova Group, may have been out of the market for a while due to a product recall last year, but it apparently used the time to catch back up with a hot new product that will pose some competitive headaches for the other cochlear implant makers.

AB’s new waterproof Neptune cochlear implant processor, the first  “swimmable” cochlear implant system, was just approved for distribution throughout Europe, following approval in December by U.S. and Canadian regulators of distribution in North America.

At first look, you might wonder why a waterproof cochlear implant system is such a big deal. I don’t wear my hearing aids when I go swimming, and other than a slight fear that I won’t hear the lifeguard’s warning that there are sharks in the water, I get along well enough without them. So why do you need a waterproof cochlear implant system?

One big reason: consider the fact that babies born deaf are now often fitted with cochlear implants right away to help them acquire language at the same rate as hearing children. Then think back to your childhood days splashing around in the pool or in the water at the beach. Not being able to hear a parent yelling at you is a lot more dangerous than my fears about missing shark warnings.

And whereas most adults take a quick dip, most kids will spend as many hours in the water as they are allowed. And for those adults who like to swim a lot for real exercise, I imagine being able to wear the CI while doing laps might be a benefit as well.

The Neptune product is also a new design. Whereas most CI processors are hung behind the ear, the Neptune is a small, seemingly indestructible unit that can be clipped do your lapel or breast pocket, or attached to an armband, with a wire extending to the magnet connector that’s affixed to your skull behind the ear.

For highly active adults and kids, I can see the armband option as a great way to stop worrying about whether the processor will stay put when you’re running, biking or swimming.

Between the cool design and impressive waterproofing technology, I’m glad to see the Number Two cochlear implant maker, now that it’s back on the market following its recall, competing aggressively with new high-tech product designs.

Lantos Technologies Has A Working Demonstration Of World’s First Digital Ear Canal Scanner

Lantos Technologies, developer of a 3D digital ear canal scanner that could be a game changer for the hearing-aid industry and consumer audio business, has been demonstrating its technology at the Starkey Laboratories 2012 Hearing Innovation Expo in Las Vegas. Audiologists at the conference Tweeted about the “wow” effect of a product that’s slick, comfortable and easy to use. To see a demonstration, click on the video:

The Massachusetts company calls its product “the world’s first intra-aural 3D scanning device.” It is a direct, digital, 3D scanner capable of measuring ear canal shape and tissue compliance to produce a highly accurate map of the ear canal. It will eliminate the uncertainties associated with manual fits, greatly improving the performance of custom made ear products across a wide variety of markets ranging from hearing aids, to headsets and earphones for iPods, MP3 players and high-end audio applications, and industrial hearing protection.

On The Starkey Labs Drawing Boards: New Xperia Brand Of “Instant-Fit Custom” Hearing Aids Will Integrate Wireless Feature Set

Sources at the Starkey Laboratories 2012 Hearing Innovations Expo in Las Vegas report that company representatives today provided a glimpse of a new Xperia brand of “Instant-Fit Custom Hearing Aids” that will integrate Starkey’s popular Wi-Series wireless technologies featuring Bluetooth phone connectivity, TV audio and MP3 streaming, and other communication direct into the hearing aids.

The new hearing aids feature an innovative in-the-canal (ITC) design which has a removable earbud that fits in the ear canal, with a housing for the processor unit that sits in the concha of the outer ear.

The unit looks like a custom hearing aid but can be fitted for most ears. And, rather than an old-fashioned half-shell or full-shell design, it bears more of a resemblance to a contemporary Bluetooth earpiece or high-tech earphones.

A big selling point apparently will be the same Starkey wireless capabilities now found in company’s very popular open-fit on-the-ear Wi series, including pairing with the Starkey Surflink remote streamer for communication direct to the hearing aids with multiple peripheral devices and binaural wireless communication between the left and right hearing aids.

There was also talk of a broader line of in-the-ear products to come, including a completely-in-the-canal (CIC) SecretEar hearing aid with the same complete wireless feature set.

Starkey has raced to compete with other major manufacturers in delivering wireless functionality following major announcements over the past two years by Widex, ReSound, Oticon, Phonak and others. Starkey sources say the Wi Series wireless feature set has proven highly popular with audiologists, who have asked for the same functionality in more form factors, especially in-the-ear custom-style products.

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