Issue 47.16
As an Audiologist, I have practiced for 34 years and treated thousands of patients. I have a hearing loss myself and wear hearing instruments. In the last few years, the hearing instrument technology has exceeded my expectations. However, in June of this year, Dr. Lance Greer and I traveled to Florida for an international hearing conference which focused on the release of a completely new type of hearing instrument.
This new hearing instrument called the OPN (Open) from Oticon out of Denmark, was developed by a team of 250 auditory scientists, auditory engineers, and technicians who worked for over six years to develop this new technology.
Technological limitations of previous hearing instruments have led to use of directionality to make speech coming from the front clear, while suppressing the rest of the sound environment. In complex listening environments where sound sources are many, previous hearing technology is too slow to keep up with fast and many sound changes.
When you cut out too many background sounds around you, it is like wearing hearing blinders and too many critical speech sounds cannot be captured for our brains. Closing down too many sounds, under-stimulates the brain and deprives it of the context needed for understanding words.
The new Velox chip in the OPN (open) hearing instruments processes 50 times faster than before. It is precise and fast enough to support our brain in making sense of sound and words. This chip has 64 sound channels. It analyzes the sounds around you more than 100 times per second. It can handle more than 12 million operations per second.
These new hearing instruments provide 30 percent improvement in speech understanding—even in the most noisy environments—compared to the previous state-of-the-art technology. It provides 20 percent less listening effort in noise and provides 20 percent more capacity to remember.
We have fit these instruments of numerous patients and everyone has been overwhelmed with their ability to understand in the most noisy situations. These instruments are truly in a league of their own!!
This amazing technology is fit on a 60 day trial period. Call 688-8866 to wear these instruments home and experience hearing like you have never experienced before!!!
Kimball B. Forbes, MCD
Audiologist of the highest order of the Elks