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Oticon More Hearing Aid Review
This video is abou new Oticon More Hearing Aid Review. Is it the BEST Hearing aid Really? Challenging listening environments are where hearing aids are really put to the test, hence Oticon More Hearing Aid Review. So we invited numerous test participants to an evening with Oticon. The new Oticon hearing aids came out in January of this year and i’ve, been holding off this review until i got a little bit more practical and hands-on experience to be able to give you guys some feedback.
So in this video i’ll, be reviewing those hearing, aids and letting you know whether it’s worth you trying them out or not. My name is matthew, alsop from harley street hearing and musicians, hearing services, and i’m all about helping those with hearing loss enjoy the best quality of life with today’s technology.
So if you’re interested in hearing as best as possible, make sure you subscribe to this channel hit the green notifications bell and you’ll be updated. Every time i release a new video. There are a few oticon more hearing aid reviews out there and i’d, recommend watching them all the difference with this one is i don’t think i can properly do a review of any hearing aid technology unless i’ve had some time spent it with patients and fitted those hearing, aids, and so the whole purpose of today’s.
Review is to review the features that are on the hearing aids and also to go into a little bit of detail. At the end of the video on some of the feedback that i’ve had from patients over the last four or five months, you have to remember that hearing aids are only as good as the audiologist setting them up and i can have patients With identical hearing test results but completely differently set hearing aids based on how we’ve, evolved and adjusted those hearing aids as time’s gone on and that’s.
Your Audiologist
How your audiologist fits into this process. Hearing aids come as a blank canvas and it’s, our job, to paint an acoustic picture in terms of not only your hearing test results, but also the lifestyle that you lead and making sure that your hearing aids work as best as possible.
For you, so for everything to be relevant in this video make sure you’re working with the best audiologist for you. Battery oticon released the oticon more in january 2021. They’ve, only released at the moment, a receiver in the canal version and it’s, a rechargeable version.
Only normally. What happens with these manufacturers? Is they’ll, bring out the initial phase of these hearing aids and they’ll build on that in the future. So we are expecting at some point to see a full behind the ear version, an in-the-ear version and also a non-rechargeable version as well.
So really it’s, a case of watching this space. For those saying that i think it’s. Great that it’s, a rechargeable version that they’ve, brought out. First, it’s, a lithium ion battery and for a three hour charge, you’ll, get a full 24 hours of battery life.
Out of the hearing aid, so what most patients do is they’ll charge them overnight and they’ll, be good to go and ready to use the morning after you can’t overcharge them due to clever circuitry being In place and you don’t have to worry about damaging the battery by keeping them on charge overnight.
The battery life will reduce by up to four hours, the more you stream from your phone to your hearing aids, but that’s. Still a whopping 20 hours per three hour charge, if you do forget to charge them overnight, a 30 minute charge will also give you six hours of life.
So if you wake up in the morning and realize you’ve forgotten to charge them pop them on charge when you’re in the shower, and they should be good to go for half of the day, other manufacturers range from 18 Hours to 30 hours for a full three hour charge, and so it’s, pretty much the middle of the road in terms of the life that you’ll, get from one single charge of these hearing aids.
Zinc Battery
As far as i’m concerned, as long as it lasts for a full day, then it doesn’t really need to last any longer. There are three main advantages of it being rechargeable over a conventional zinc air battery.
The first one is that you, don’t have to change the batteries once a week. The second one is you’re saving quite a bit of money by not having to constantly replace those batteries and then, finally, from an environmental point of view, we’re, not contributing to more batteries just being thrown into landfill.
The charger is great: you simply drop the hearing aids into the charger you don’t need to switch the hearing aids off. They automatically do so as soon as you drop them in there you don’t need to turn the hearing.
Aids on because, as soon as they come out of the charger, they turn themselves on as well, and it has a usb on the end. So it can be plugged into the likes of your car, an external battery pack or just the normal three pin plug.
That goes into the walls. It has a traffic light based system on the back of the hearing aid. So there’s, a little led on the back of the hearing aid. It doesn’t light up normally, but when it’s on charge, it will give you a red light to let you know that it’s not fully charged yet as soon as it hits that fully charged mark.
You’ll, get a green, solid light on there. There are a couple of downsides of oticon’s, charger versus other manufacturers number one. Is it’s, quite big? So if you’re traveling, it’s. Quite a big thing to carry away with you, and also some of the other manufacturers, have a battery pack built into the charger itself a little bit like a set of airpods.
Plugged Into The Wall
So when the charger isn’t plugged into the wall, you can use it as a carry case and it ‘ Ll still be charging those hearing – aids technology levels. There are three different technology levels available for the oticon more range.
You have. The more one, the more two and the more three with the wall, one being the most advanced of the three all three of them look identically the same, but it’s, the computer inside, which varies between the three of them.
When we look at recommending a specific technology level for a patient, we’re, not just looking at the hearing test results that’s, one factor, but really it comes down to the lifestyle of the person sat in front of us.
So if i’ve got someone that sits at home and watches tv all day. We could go with quite a basic entry-level hearing aid. However, if i’ve got somebody in front of me. That leaves a little bit of a more complicated life with a diverse range of listening situations.
Then it’s, important that we ‘ Ve got a hearing aid that can complement that lifestyle and cope with those more complicated listening environments fitting range. The thing i love about receiving the canal hearing aids is that the power of the hearing aid is determined by the power of the speaker, that’s on the end of the hearing aid, and so that means that if your hearing gets worse down, The line, instead of having to get an entirely new set of hearing aids, you can actually put a more powerful speaker on the hearing aid, thus extending the life of the hearing aid.
Suitable
The oticon more hearing aid is suitable for a very mild hearing loss. All the way to a profound hearing loss, choosing the right speaker on the end of the hearing aid isn’t, the job that you need to do it’s, something that the audiologist should do automatically when they’re.
Ordering the right hearing aid for you it also shouldn’t influence the cost of the hearing aid. If you’re hearing test results for within the gray areas on these graphs, then it means that the oticon war hearing aid would be suitable for you colours the otakon wall.
Hearing aid comes in a range of colours and what i tend to do is to match the colour of the hair of the person sat in front of me. The audiologist should have a colour chart so that you can choose the most appropriate one for you.
I tend to find that the majority of my patients go with the chroma beige color visually. It looks pretty much identical to the open s rechargeable hearing aid, it’s a little bit bigger than the battery version, and if you’re wondering why hearing aids seem to be getting bigger.
Nowadays, it’s really because of two main things number one is connectivity and the actual size of the bluetooth chip, that’s in these hearing aids, and that also requires a little bit more battery power, so that battery has to be A little bit larger, also with rechargeable hearing aids, we need to ensure that that battery is going to last for a full day tinnitus sound support.
This tinnitus feature is available in all three technology levels and allows your audiologist to provide you with a level of sound enrichment therapy, which is essentially a way of providing you with some degree of background noise, so that you’re, not surrounded by silence, Which would normally allow your tinnitus to really come through to the forefront these can manually be adjusted using the oticon on app, which i’ll cover a little bit later on.
If tinnitus is one of the main reasons why you’re? Looking at hearing aids, then i’d, also recommend. Looking at the widex moment, hearing aids and their zen features they’ve got something called fractal tones which has been proven to be particularly effective when it comes to managing and looking after tinnitus remote adjustments.
Really Useful
One feature that’s turned out to be really useful. Over the last 12 months, isn’t unique to the oticon more and that’s, the remote adjustment setting. Now what this means is that we can remotely adjust hearing aids when you’re sat at home and the audiologist is sat in clinic.
Now we don’t have access to every single menu that’s out there, but we do have access to 90 of the things that we can adjust. So if you have to travel a very long way for a really small adjustment, it’s, something great that we can utilize oticon on app.
Each manufacturer has their own app for their bluetooth, enabled hearing aids and it would be worth me doing a video in itself just covering all the features of oticon’s on hearing aid app. However, to give you a brief overview, it allows you to adjust the volume of the hearing aids.
You can select different acoustic profiles, so different programs. It allows you to track your usage. It allows you to connect your hearing aids to other technology, such as being able to connect your hearing aids to either a doorbell or a fire alarm.
You can check your battery life and you can even look for a misplaced hearing aid using the geo location on your app. The only thing that you can’t do using the oticon on app that you can do with other hearing aid.
Manufacturers is to create your own acoustic programs, which is not necessarily such a bad thing, because, if i think about all the patients that i have that wear hearing aids with the manufacturers that you can create these programs, it’s very, very seldom that They often do streaming.
This is the first generation of an oticon hearing aid which allows direct streaming from an android phone to your hearing aids so that’s for streaming either. Music, podcasts, radio or phone calls. I’ll, put a link in the description below of the current compatible android phones.
They do need to have android version 10 and bluetooth version 5.. This isn’t new for iphones. They’ve, always had the ability to stream sound from the phone to the hearing aids, the advantage of both phonak and unitron over oticon hearing aids.
Manufacturer
In fact, over all other manufacturers of hearing aids is that the microphone on your hearing aid in those manufacturers also picks up your voice, so it’s, a truly hands-free device, whereas with oticon, you still need the microphone of your phone.
To pick up. Your voice to be able to send it to the person on the other end of the phone it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, because the problem is the microphones on the hearing. Aids aren’t, arranged positively to be picking up your voice, and so the feedback that i’m.
Getting with patients that do have these hearing aids is that it is quite bad at picking up all the environmental sound around you and sending that to the person on the other end of the phone, and so it can make it quite difficult for them to be Able to hear you speak saying that apple released, a press release only last week saying that it’s, something that they are working on.
What we don’t know yet is if it will be backwards compatible or if there’ll, be something built into the hearing aids that already exist, allowing for this hands-free setup accessories. Oticon have got a great range of accessories to work with their hearing aids too.
So there’ll, always be some environments where hearing aids can only do so much and the accessories can fill those gaps. So we have the connect clip which allows you to use your phone hands-free. They can also allow you to pair your hearing aids to your computer, and so, if you’re on a teams or a zoom call, you can use your hearing aids.
Computer Speakers
As your computer speakers, we have the remote control. So if you don’t have a smartphone, you can make adjustments to the settings on your hearing aids without having to press the buttons. On the back of the hearing aid, we have the edumite, which is a remote microphone, the tv connector, which also allows you to stream the sound of the tv directly to both of your hearing aids, which is pretty good when it comes to these tvs now, which Have such poor speaker quality and then finally, we have the phone adapter, which allows you to use your landline directly with both of your hearing aids as well background noise, oticon’s, previous generation of hearing aid technology completely shuck up the way in which Hearing aids work in more complicated and more noisy listening situations traditionally.
I mean since forever hearing aid manufacturers have used something called directionality so that when you go into a noisy listening situation, the microphones on the back of the hearing aids turn off and the forwards Facing ones are left on, and so the idea is that, whatever you’re looking at you aim to pick up on top of that, the hearing aids then look at cleaning the signal by selecting any sound that doesn’t have a Speech-Like pattern and trying to attenuate that sound otakon threw the rulebook away and claimed that, whilst that might have some theoretical strength in practice, sound doesn’t really follow any of the rules, and so sound coming from a noisy environment may just hit a Wall and then also go into those forwards facing microphones, and so your brain is still having all of that competing sound.
To have to decipher the information that it wants versus the information that it doesn’t want, in fact it makes it more challenging because it’s all coming from the front, rather than its natural position of coming from 360 degrees.
360 Degree
So they brought out a feature which essentially picks up sound from 360 degrees and scans, the environment 500 times per. Second, it’s. Looking for sounds that do have a speech like pattern and that the hearing aid thinks that you’ll, find important, and instead of attenuating all of the sounds that you don’t want to hear it actually enhances.
The sounds that you do bringing them through the background noise. They claim to have done this through something called a deep neural network which involves artificial intelligence and they’re, not their first hearing aid manufacturers to have claimed to have used artificial intelligence.
In terms of training, a set of hearing aids widex have been doing that for a number of years. Now i don’t know whether they’re, just coining the term, because it’s on trend. All that i care about is whether it works or not.
The concept of a deep neural network in itself is incredibly complicated and going to be really hard for me to summarize in this video, and so i’ll, leave that to some of the engineers out there, but from my understanding it’S a way of training, a hearing aid to understand not only what certain sounds are but to look for specific patterns and then by itself make decisions in terms of whether they ‘
Re sounds that you should want to hear, or you should not want to hear – and this all feeds into the automation of the hearing aids so meaning that you’re not having to constantly make adjustments to the settings on the hearing aids.
The hearing aids are learning and they’re doing all of that. For you, i imagine the big question that you guys all have is. Does it work, and in summary i would say yes, we ‘ Ve, definitely got far better speech.
Understanding Noise
Understanding in noise, with the oticon, more hearing, aid versus any other oticon hearing aid that we’ve ever had access to. I’ve, been fitting these hearing aids since january and, of course, with any new hearing aid technology.
There are teething problems, but it’s, nothing. That would stop me from recommending these hearing aids to any of my patients. I’ve, been fitting them to new patients, and i’ve, also been fitting them to existing patients and exchanging them from both widex starkey resound and phonak.
I’ve, even exchanged patients wearing the original oticon open one hearing aids and they ‘ Ve noticed significant improvements in terms of hearing more complicated listening situations such as groups, crowds and noisy listening environments.
Oticon’s. Own research, which sometimes we do have to take with a bit of a pinch of salt, also states that there’s. A significant improvement in hearing in noise. With these hearing aids versus the opens hearing aids that they brought out about two years ago now, i hope you found this video useful guys.
If you have any questions, please put them in the comments below and i’ll get back to you. If you haven’t subscribed yet make sure you do so, and if you like this video, then go ahead and click like i’ll, see you in the next video.