Hansaton's AQ Hearing Aids Get An Overnight Charge For All-Day Power

If you can recharge your cell phone once and it will work for several days, why can’t you do the same thing with your hearing aids? Jerry L. Yanz of Hansaton will tell anyone within earshot why. More important, he will tell you how yesterday’s inadequate rechargeable hearing aids are being replaced by new rechargeables that actually work the way you do–all day long.

Until recently, the few rechargeable hearing aids on the market had significant limitations. Often their charge lasted less than a full day, so if you depended on them from morning to night, you were out of luck.

Many first-generation rechargeable hearing aids also suffered from the problem you had with early cell phone batteries — if you recharged them before they were completely empty, they would run out of gas quicker and quicker after each charge.

As a result, most hearing aids today still require non-rechargeable, disposable batteries. The batteries last a few days or, if you’re lucky, more than a week. But no matter how energy-efficient your hearing aids are, you end up buying dozens of batteries a year at up to a dollar a piece. It’s expensive, and disposing of so many dead batteries is wasteful and bad for the environment.

But there’s good news: Hansaton solved the problems of first-generation rechargeables to many users’ satisfaction more than a year ago when it introduced its new AQ 2G hearing aids featuring the AQ Custom ITE (in-the-ear) and AQ X-Mini RIC (receiver-in-the-canal) models. Jerry Yanz, PhD and director of audiology at Hansaton Acoustics, is a long-time hearing-industry evangelist who has been banging the drum for rechargeable hearing aids as a solution whose time has finally come. He recently co-authored an article in the Hearing Review telling you everything you need to know about the new rechargeable hearing aids.

The new Hansaton hearing aids keep their charge for 20 hours or longer and fully recharge in less than eight hours. Unless you sleep with your hearing aids turned on, you get to use them during all your waking hours. If you wear contact lenses and take them out only when you go to bed and pop them back in when you wake up, now you can follow the same routine with your hearing aids.

Other manufacturers with rechargeables already on the market as well as new entrants will be racing to catch up to with new rechargeables that deliver the mainstream features that Hansaton is promoting. When they do, customers will have a choice of fully functional rechargeables to compare against traditional hearing aids requiring disposable batteries.

If you are shopping for rechargeable hearing aids, Yanz and his co-authors suggest asking questions such as: How long will the charge last? Will the power really last all day? How long do they take to to recharge? Will they be fully charged even after a short night’s sleep? How long will the rechargeable batteries last before I have to replace them? Will the manufacturer replace them for me? And how convenient and easy is the recharging system?

When multiple manufacturers along with Hansaton are able to come up with satisfactory answers to all those questions, we may see the day when rechargeable hearing aids are as familiar as our rechargeable cell phones.

Intiga-I Hearing Aid is Oticon's Entry In The Hot Invisible Hearing Aid Market

Oticon has jumped into the hot market for “invisible” hearing aids–tiny devices that sit deep within the ear canal–with its new Intiga-I model for first-time users.

The Intiga-I hearing aid has a nanocoated wax protection system and a T- cap microphone protection system that will enable the device to withstand the moist environment of the deep ear canal. And it features Oticon’s high-end SpeechGuard sound processing technology as well as the company’s Rise 2 amplifier which conserves battery power.

The Oticon Intiga-I joins other major brands’ entries into the popular market for small invisible hearing aids aimed at first-time users, including the Starkey AMP, promoted as the first hearing aid “for people who aren’t ready for a hearing aid.”

The Intiga-I follows last year’s introduction of the Oticon Intiga, a small, high-performance on-the-ear open-fit hearing aid that the company promotes as “the world’s smallest fully wireless hearing solution,” enabling the hearing aid to act as a wireless, hands-free headset for cell phones and other entertainment devices.

The Lyric Hearing Aid Is Completely Invisible

Phonak announced it has shrunk its Lyric invisible hearing aids and improved the fit to make it accessible to 50 percent more consumers. The Lyric hearing aids meet the needs of people with mild to moderate hearing loss who are looking for a completely invisible hearing solution.

Placed deeply within the ear canal by an audiologist, the Lyric hearing aid is worn day and night for up to four months, when its battery expires and is replaced by the audiologist. The new size makes it easier to fit a larger number of consumers.

“I like to compare Lyric to the contact lens: just wear it and forget about it,” Phonak CEO Lukas Braunschweiler said in a news release. The Lyric hearing aids are sold on a subscription basis, with upgrades and service bundled into the subscription price.

Unitron's Quantum Family of Hearing Aids

At last week’s AudiologyNow convention in Boston, Unitron showed its new premium hearing instruments for its Quantum and Moxi product families featuring better speech comprehension through improved location of sound.

Built on Unitron’s Era sound processing platform, the new Quantum Pro and Moxi Pro feature Unitron’s binaural spatial processing and SpeechZone automated directional technology to make it easier to understand speech in challenging listening environments. With SpeechZone, the two hearing instruments work together to determine the location of a sound and focus on it.

Unitron also showed its uDirect 2 and uTV 2 accessories. uDirect 2 uses Bluetooth technology to enable seamless wireless connection to entertainment and communications devices. It also acts as a remote control for quick access to essential features. Unitron’s uTV 2 accessory provides similar wireless connectivity for the television, sending stereo audio to both hearing instruments via the uDirect 2.

Siemens Eclipse Hearing Aid Has A Soft Dome For Deep Insertion In The Ear Canal

Siemens Hearing Instruments introduced its XCEL sound processing platform, the next generation of its BestSound platform technology balancing improved sound quality with better speech comprehension for hearing aid users. The XCEL sound processing system is integrated with its new Eclipse in-the-canal hearing aid as well as new models in its Pure and Motion hearing aid families.

The Eclipse XCEL is a deep-fit completely-in-the-canal hearing aid featuring a flexible, soft dome designed to fit comfortably deep within the sensitive bony areas of the ear canal.

“Eclipse is virtually invisible and delivers beautiful, natural sound,” Scott Davis, CEO of Siemens Hearing Instruments said in a news release. “It’s the first solution that provides the benefits of a deep-fit hearing aid using the simple, safe, standard impression methods hearing care professionals employ every day.”

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.

Neurotone's LACE Online Auditory Training Software Helps The Brain Learn To Understand Speech In Noise

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.

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.

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.

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.