Technology

Phonak Dynamic Soundfield Technology Turns The Classroom Into A Giant Hearing Aid

Soundfield classroom amplification systems have improved the education and lives of thousands of schoolchildren who otherwise would miss valuable instruction simply because they cannot hear their teachers well enough to understand what they are teaching. Now Phonak has put its vast experience designing hearing aids to use with a next-generation soundfield system featuring a 12-speaker array that reduces echoing and reverberation and automatically adjusts frequency and volume levels to achieve optimum signal-to-noise ratios in changing listening environments.  The new Phonak Dynamic Soundfield system essentially turns the entire classroom into a giant hearing aid that can dramatically improve comprehension and learning.

Classroom amplification systems have been around a long time, as have FM-based systems transmitting the teacher’s voice into headsets or hearing aids worn by individual hard-of-hearing students. But the experience of users varies tremendously depending on the placement and quality of speakers, the quality of the microphones and amplifiers, and the acoustics of the classroom itself. The drawbacks of earlier systems were so pronounced that the Acoustical Society of America found that “improperly maintained microphones and loudspeakers or poor user skills can cause even poorer speech communication than no amplification system.” In other words, amplifying unintelligible noise only makes voices that much more unintelligible.

But long-term studies have indicated that amplification and other forms of assistance in the classroom can dramatically improve learning The Mainstream Amplification Resource Room Study (MARRS), which found that “significant educational instruction effects can be achieved by sound field amplification” and that “these gains can be cost effectively realized within the regular classroom without the need for stigmatizing labeling and segregation as well as expensive and scheduling complications of special class placement.”

Phonak’s Dynamic Soundfield system addresses the reverberation and echoing that makes comprehension more difficult with amplification by its array of directional speakers that automatically adjust frequency and volume settings to the acoustics of the room to reduce rather than increase reverberation. Years of research into how directional microphones in hearing aids can achieve a higher signal-to-noise ratio to make voices easier to understand in difficult listening environments have been applied to the acoustical problems amplifying a teacher’s voice in a noisy classroom.

The new Phonak Soundfield system is also the first to operate simultaneously in multiple modes, permitting the teacher to broadcast directly through a Phonak inspiro FM transmitter to individual students wearing headsets or hearing aids while broadcasting to the rest of the class over the amplified system. The new system also is “future proof,” providing flexible integration with standard computer and audio systems, and eliminates interference issues through automatic frequency hopping, allowing the Dynamic Soundfield to co-exist alongside a school’s WiFi and Bluetooth networks.

Two Cheers For On Semiconductor’s Acquisition Of Hearing-Aid Chip Maker Sound Design Technologies

On Semiconductor’s recent acquisition of Sound Design Technologies reduces the number of independent manufacturers of digital signal processor (DSP) chips for hearing aids, lessening competition in an industry that is already highly concentrated. Less competition is not a good thing over the long run, because when fewer manufacturers control a market, they can charge higher prices for the products they’ve already built. They can also invest less in new technology innovations because there are fewer competitors out there likely to leapfrog them. However, over the short term, On Semiconductor’s acquisition acquisition of Sound Design may actually be a very good thing for the hearing industry. Here’s why.

Ever since Sound Design spun out of Canadian semiconductor maker Gennum several years ago, it has been the only independent DSP chip manufacturer focused on the hearing aid market. Many hearing-aid manufacturers who do not design and build their own chips use Sound Design’s chips to power their hearing aids. DSPs are specialized semiconductor products whose hearing-aid manufacturer customers expect lower costs and higher performance every year along with more miniaturization and special features. DSPs allow hearing-aid makers to provide better feedback canceling capability, automatic adjustment to different listening environments, automatic adjustment of directional microphones, wireless communication between left and right hearing aids to provide better hearing “in stereo,” Bluetooth integration, and numerous other features that have dramatically improved digital hearing aids in recent years.

Sound Design’s new Wolverine DSP is a high-performance digital engine for hearing aids that is smaller than earlier DSPs, consumes less power, delivers more processing capability and enables easier and more flexible development and deployment of custom sound-processing algorithms and special applications by hearing-aid manufacturers. Clearly the company’s focus on the hearing-aid market has paid off.

But chip design, manufacturing and distribution is a highly capital-intensive business, and Sound Design on its own was nowhere near as large as many of the semiconductor companies it would have to compete against. Without being able to achieve economies of scale from a manufacturing operation selling a lot of products, it’s hard for a chip company to keep costs as low as customers want.

Therefore being acquired should enable Sound Design to leverage On Semiconductor’s mass-production capabilities to keep costs down. It will also be able to tap On Semiconductor’s deep bench of designers with extensive experience developing power and signal management semiconductors, logic chips, discrete components and custom devices — all of which can be applied to next-generation hearing-aid DSPs. That’s a benefit to hearing-aid manufacturers, who need to continue integrating all kinds of new capabilities into ever-smaller form factors. On Semiconductor spun out of Motorola several years ago and is now a leading publicly held semiconductor company with nearly $2 billion (USD) in annual revenue, so it’s got all the resources a small manufacturer of hearing-aid DSPs should need. If it allows Sound Design’s team of executives to continue focusing as relentlessly on the hearing-aid market as they have in the past, the acquisition could be a win-win-win for On Semiconductor, Sound Design, hearing-aid manufacturers who depend on them, and hearing-aid users who will continue to benefit from new technologies and better performance at lower costs.

However, that’s a big “if.” The business landscape is littered with the carcasses of failed acquisitions where hoped-for synergy was never achieved. And in this case, competition in the target market has suffered a double-whammy, because in 2007 On Semiconductor acquired the other leading independent maker of hearing-aid DSPs, AMI Semiconductor. Combining Sound Design with AMI’s hearing-aid products leaves On Semiconductor as the only game in town for hearing-aid manufacturers who want to acquire a standard DSP rather than develop their own. That means less competition in the hearing-aid industry. Which gets us back to where we started — the fear that as one of only a few suppliers in an already-concentrated industry, On Semiconductor might slow down investments in new technology and features to improve its profit margins and, with fewer competitors breathing down its neck, limit price reductions as well.

That’s why I’m giving On Semiconductor’s aggressive move into the hearing-aid business two cheers, not three. They are big cheers, because On Semiconductor should be able to continue providing new DSP technologies that improve performance while lowering costs for hearing-aid manufacturers. But I will reserve my third cheer for the yet-to-be named competitors out there, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, who are inventing new chips that will outperform what’s on the market today and give On Semiconductor a competitive run for its money.

VitaSound Neuro-Compensator Applies Brain Science To A Unique And Potentially Revolutionary New Sound Processing System For Hearing Aids

VitaSound Audio, Inc., a young hearing-aid company in Canada, has come up with an entirely new approach to sound-processing software for hearing aids that could fundamentally change the way we think about compensating for damaged hearing. I got a demo of VitaSound’s Neuro-Compensator technology several months ago and have been struggling ever since to come up with appropriate words to describe it. “Unique,” “new,” “unprecedented” and “potentially revolutionary” are the best I can do for starters.

The Neuro-Compensator sound processing system is based on nearly two decades of research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, into how the human brain comprehends the signals processed by the auditory system, from the middle ear through the auditory nerve. The researchers mapped the signals produced by hundreds of auditory inputs processed by people with healthy hearing, coming up with a hugely complex model of “normal” hearing response to sounds ranging from human speech to music to pure tones to rush-hour traffic to cocktail-party noise. Then they developed the Neuro-Compensator software to compare the norm to that of a person with damaged hearing, and to produce a hearing-aid amplification program that not only amplifies the frequencies where hearing has been lost, but also filters out sounds that a healthy auditory processing system would normally suppress. The benefit is better comprehension because the system constantly adjusts amplification at multiple frequencies in response to different sounds to match the auditory profile of a normal, healthy auditory system responding to various listening environments.

It’s a fundamentally different approach from the digital signal processing  (DSP) algorithms used by most hearing-aid companies. Since the days of analog processors, the usual approach to hearing-loss correction has been simple, linear amplification at several frequencies where the user has suffered loss. Even today’s low-cost hearing aids only amplify at four bands. And although more sophisticated DSPs are available which can ultimately let the software drive amplification at up to 64 channels, the linear approach to amplification means all sounds at those frequencies are amplified. Therefore users often complain of over-amplification, especially of background noise that the brain’s more intelligent auditory processing system (when healthy) is able to suppress.

The Neuro-Compensator’s model of a healthy auditory processing system enables VitaSound to amplify the right sounds at the right time, and NOT amplify the wrong sounds that cause so much frustration for hearing-aid users. That translates into a potential solution to the Holy Grail of hearing aids: letting me once again comprehend conversation in a noisy cocktail party. The accompanying graphic above shows auditory maps for normal hearing and damaged hearing; it also shows the maps produced by a VitaSound hearing aid using the Neuro-Compensator, versus a hearing aid using standard, current-generation wide-dynamic range compression (WDRC) software. The Neuro-Compensator map fills in the gaps in the map of the damaged ear without adding the extra amplification where the normal ear doesn’t want it, whereas the WDRC map shows more noise than the user wants.

VitaSound has a unique market delivery system for the software as well. Most hearing aids are programmed by the audiologist on site, using relatively simple programming tools provided by the manufacturer. VitaSound takes a different approach with the Neuro-Compensator, with the audiologist uploading the patient’s audiogram to VitaSound. There a powerful computer compares the user’s profile with the complex Neuro-Compensator healthy-hearing profile, and the Neuro-Compensator’s sound-processing algorithm produces the user’s unique program. The audiologist then downloads the program directly into the user’s hearing aid and performs any additional adjustments using an on-site programmer supplied by VitaSound.

How revolutionary is the Neuro-Compensator technology? A lot depends on how accurate and applicable VitaSound’s model of normal hearing is to all listening situations. The more complex the normal-hearing model, the better it will compensate for hearing damage and provide a unique program compensating for the user’s specific hearing loss and replicating normal hearing. In theory, with Moore’s Law dictating continued improvements in digital signal processing, Neuro-Compensator software should be able to continuously improve its normal-hearing model while enabling continuous improvements in sound processing to VitaSound’s hearing aids. In practice, much will depend on real-world user experience. VitaSound has plenty of anecdotal evidence from their very first users who have been struck by the improvement over their old hearing aids. But because VitaSound still is in the very early stages of broadly rolling out its Neuro-Compensator hearing aids, it will be a while before a critical mass of customers can testify to their superiority, and still longer before clinical trials can provide further documentary proof.

Just as important, the company has a marketing and distribution challenge. The global hearing-aid market is dominated by a few major manufacturers who distribute their products through a channel of professional dispensers and audiologists who often are loyal to the brands they are accustomed to fitting. Many fitters are averse to changing horses when the one they are riding is providing them with a good business and reasonably satisfied patients. So any new entrant into the hearing-aid market has to provide an easily demonstrable performance improvement and/or comparable performance at a much lower price that will get the audiologists and dispensers to change the brand that they fit. However, given the large number of unsatisfied hearing-aid customers still out there, whose multi-thousand-dollar investments are sitting in the dresser drawer, along with the many, many additional potential customers who haven’t yet decided to get hearing aids, there is plenty of room for a new market entrant with a compelling value proposition. VitaSound’s CEO, Gora Ganguli, has long and rich experience in the the technology and hearing-aid industries, having previously served in senior executive positions at IBM and Gennum Corp.’s DSP business serving the hearing-aid industry. And VitaSound has impeccable technology credentials with a Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Philippe Pango, who did much of the original Neuro-Compensator research and helped productize it for the VitaSound hearing aids.

The proof will be in the pudding as users sample the new hearing aids and report their experiences. Stay tuned, because I intend to make a pilgrimage to VitaSound’s Hamilton, Ontario headquarters for a live demonstration of the technology if I can arrange it. That way I’ll be able to write up at least one user’s very personal experience with a technology that has tremendous potential to shake up the global hearing-aid business.

Can Hearing Aids Make You Smarter? Research On Cognitive Hearing and Listening Fatigue Says They Can — Is The Industry Finally Listening?

Hearing aid manufacturers have finally started listening to ten years of academic research into concepts known as “cognitive hearing,” “listening fatigue” and “cognitive fatigue.” It took them long enough, but I’m not complaining, because at least they are finally claiming to attack the problem of hearing loss at its roots.

In recent announcements of their next-generation hearing aids, industry leaders Starkey Laboratories and Oticon both claimed their new products would ameliorate “cognitive fatigue” and therefore improve not only hearing but also the ability to listen and understand. Since the invention of the hearing aid, the industry has focused mostly on simple amplification that makes noise louder and therefore easier to hear. Too often, hearing aids amplify the noises uses don’t want to hear and actually make it more difficult to comprehend the sounds — speech — they do want to hear. Now the industry is finally trying to address the critical issue of better cognition.

While neither Starkey nor Oticon went so far as to say their hearing aids would make you smarter, that’s really the value proposition the industry should start trying to deliver. No, hearing aids can’t make you smarter all by themselves. But hearing well can enable you to listen well, and listening well can enable you to better understand what you hear, better understanding makes it easier for you to communicate in real time with other people, and intelligent communication lets your brain be as smart as it naturally wants to be. Now think of the same scenario in reverse: no hearing assistance means less listening means less understanding means less intelligent communication. In other words, failure to get a good pair of hearing aids can make you appear to be a whole lot stupider than you really are.

The catch is what constitutes a “good pair of hearing aids.” Dr. Brent Edwards at the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, California has been looking at the issue of “cognitive hearing” for years, and his work is finally working its way into the products Starkey is delivering to the marketplace. Instead of looking at the problem from the outside in with the mechanics of replacing lost hearing with amplified sound, Edwards and other researchers have looked at it from the inside out by studying how the brain interprets sounds and uses them to create understanding and intelligence. Critical, previously ignored issues –  such as how the brain processes and then ignores background noise, how it picks up nuances in timbre and tone to make fine distinctions between similar-sounding consonants in speech, and how the mental overhead required to compensate for hearing loss affects overall cognitive performance — are now providing guideposts for product developers deciding on how to use the new wealth of digital technology and software to process sound in helpful ways.

A four-year old presentation Edwards gave at the American Academy of Audiology conference is available here. It’s a good starting point for anyone who wants to understand issues surrounding cognitive hearing and hearing-aid product development better. It also points to the research of others in the field, especially Robert Sweetow, who did pioneering studies on how therapeutic training in hearing and listening can dramatically improve comprehension, a concept embodied in Neurtone’s LACE training software.

Will the new hearing aids from Starkey and Oticon prove to be revolutionary, game-changing breakthroughs in delivering on the promise not just of better hearing but of better cognition? More likely, they will be incremental but important advances in today’s hearing-aid technologies. But I’m more optimistic now that with a new awareness of and focus on the core issue of better hearing — better performance in life through better cognition and understanding — the industry will eventually find ways to deliver on the promise.

Geek Alert: How Knowles Electronics Makes Hearing-Aid Microphones Smaller and Smarter

I’ve always been amazed by the directional microphones in my hearing aids. They are super-sensitive, they can be adjusted to catch noise either 360 degrees or just from the person speaking to me, and they are smaller than your fingernail. The technology that has to go into such finely tuned instruments is amazing, and I recently came across a good video of Daniel Warren, director of research for Knowles Electronics, that gives a flavor of the rocket science behind them. (It’s a promotional video for Wolfram Research, known for the Mathematica software tools used by engineers and, more recently, for the revolutionary computational search engine, Wolfram Alpha, developed over the past decade by computer science genius Steve Wolfram). The video is also a good example of the pains engineers have to go through to explain in layman’s terms how their inventions work and why they are so important. My rule of thumb is, even if I can’t understand half of what they say, if the product works, I will use it.

Gennum Abandons Hearing-Aid Market With DSP Chip and Headset Spinoffs

Gennum Corp. of Canada, long one of the leading suppliers of digital signal processing (DSP) chips and other technologies to the hearing-aid and headset industries, is abandoning the hearing-aid market with the spinout of its hearing instrument design and manufacturing operations to a private equity group and the sale of its consumer Bluetooth headset business to a consumer electronics company based in Sweden. The Gores Group, LLC, a Southern California-based private equity fund, has purchased the hearing-aid chip business and is backing a management spinout that will be named Sound Design Technologies Ltd. And CellPoint Connect AB, manufacturer of the Flamingo Bluetooth, has acquired the Gennum nXZEN and nX6000 Bluetooth headsets that have won acclaim for their sophisticated DSP-based noise-cancellation technology. Gennum’s retreat from the hearing-aid business isn’t necessarily bad news for hearing-aid manufactrers depending on its DSP chips, because the equity firm is backing a group of managers already running Gennum’s Sound Design hearing-aid business and presumably will help them more sharply focus on hearing-industry customer needs in addition to providing investment capital to further develop their technology.

Gennum’s DSP chips are digital engines for hearing aids. For manufacturers more interested in integrating standard technologies to deliver hearing-aid solutions to customers rather than designing their digital products from the ground up, Gennum and other chip companies such as AMI Semiconductors provide robust DSP platforms. It’s an open question whether the hearing-aid industry will trend toward a more horizontal structure, with component and software suppliers providing system elements that integrators will put together and market, much as personal computer manufacturers such as Dell and HP depend on chiips from Intel and operating system software from Microsoft. About a year ago, U.S. leaders Starkey spun off its chip development operation to AMI. If the trend continues, companies such as AMI and especially the new Sound Design, which wiil be focused exclusively on the hearing-assistance industry, will provide new hearing-aid designers with the components they need to get into the market quickly and cost effectively. That is the kind of competition that tends to increase product availability and lower costs to consumers — something that’s long-overdue in the hearing-aid industry.

Meanwhile CellPoint will use Gennum’s excellent Bluetooth technology to improve its position in the fiercely competitive market for consumer Bluetooth headsets for mobile phones. It is a great example of advanced DSP technology originally developed for hearing aids working its way into consumer products, providing better sound clarity and amplification to a market where aging ears and a need for smaller, more portable products is creating a demand for better call quality. Not addressed in the Bluetooth announcement is the fate of Gennum’s Hearphone earpiece which amplifies environmental sound and original ZEN headset which was its first Bluetooth entry. However, financial filings by Gennum in the past year indicate a desire by the company to move beyond these businesses, so I won’t hold my breath to see much marketing oomph behind them from Gennum going forward.

The acquisition and establishment of the new Sound Design company won’t formally close until sometime in October, so we won’t hear until then about details on the company’s product and market plans.

Agilent Makes It Easy To Design Hearing-Aid Compatible Cell Phones

Now there’s no excuse. Agilent Technologies has come up with a design system enabling manufacturers of mobile phones to easily ensure their handsets meet all the hearing-aid-compatibility (HAC) standards mandated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The news release and associated product material on the new Antenna Modeling Design System (AMDS) are worth looking at because they give a tutorial on electro-magnetic radition and the shielding technology required to assure your hearing aids are actually able to hear the sounds coming out of your cell phone. “By February 2008, all wireless carriers in the U.S. must ensure that 50 percent of their phones are hearing-aid compatible,” says Agilent Product Marketing Manager Erwin De Baetselier. “Today, we are leading the industry by offering HAC compatibility tests in our EM simulation environment, ensuring that designers of wireless devices will be able to meet these important and rigorous specifications.” I’ve written before about the foot-dragging by mobile phone manfacturers unwilling to put the extra effort into designing hearing-aid-compatible phones, and it’s good to see a leading supplier of components and design services taking the FCC mandate seriously.

Future Cochlear Implant Patients Might Preserve Some Residual Hearing

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new, less-invasive means of implanting electrodes into the cochlea that may ultimately do less damage to hearing nerves in the cochlea and preserve more residual hearing in the patient.

The new electrode is thinner and can be inserted with a new device that enables doctors to monitor their progress and avoid doing the kind of damage that currently results in most implant patients losing most or all of what is left of their natural hearing. Because cochlear implants directly stimulate the auditory nerve they are able to bypass the hairlike cilia hearing cells that line the cochlea. And because it is designed to go deeper into the cochlea, it may provide more stimulation of low-frequency sounds, which could significantly improve the hearing of implantees. The new electrode is being tested on animals and would not be available for human patients for at least four years. But when it arrives, because it is made with the same materials used to make semiconductor chips, it will bring implant patients one step closer to true “Bionic Man” status that Michael Chorost has written about in Rebuilt.

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