(photo above is Thomas Behrens an Oticon engineer, Lia Best, Audiologist and Kris Hewitt from Oticon)
Broadmead Hearing Clinic‘s Audiologist Lia Best recently joined more than 400 Audiologists at a professional conference in Toronto that introduced Oticon Opn. Opn expertly manages multiple speech and noise sources so people don’t have to work as hard to understand speech, even in challenging listening situations like restaurants or social gatherings.
What Lia learned is that preliminary testing shows that Opn increases speech understanding, the parameter most important to hearing aid wearers, by 30%. People who wear Opn also experience 20% less listening effort when trying to understand speech.
The small, discreet hearing aid is a powerhouse of innovative technology. Opn is powered by the high speed Velox platform – 50 times faster than previous technology – that scans, analyzes and reacts to sounds in the environments more than 100 times per second. Opn allows wearers to enjoy an open sound experience where surrounding sounds are available but not intrusive. They can easily follow the sounds they want to hear and quickly shift their attention when desired.
Opn offers easy wireless connectivity to a variety of smartphones and other iOS and Android devices. Audio is streamed directly to the hearing aids using Bluetooth technology developed especially for hearing aids that uses significantly less battery power when streaming.
With the free, downloadable Oticon OPN App, wearers can control volume, program or device selection and other functions with just a tap of their smartphone.
This new hearing aid is available for shipping starting today, June 6, 2016.
We are very excited about this shift away from traditional directionality and are curious to see if our patients will prefer this approach. If you are interested in being one of our first to try this new hearing aid please give our office a call and we can arrange a free 3 week trial.