Artificial Intelligence AMA with Senior Phonak Experts

@Stefanlauner said:

Average industry wear time is 8 -10 h, SPhere users use the devices 12 + h / day

I am not sure the average is 8 to 10 hours, if you have been on this forum it’s more like 14 to 18 hour.

Which bring me to this tricky question:

Are you committed in bringing hearing aids with disposable batteries across your hearing aids portfolio, especially Audeo and Naida?

From Dr. Launer: To the best of my knowledge, xMems technologies is not yet mature enough for our use case - size, power consumption and bandwidth for an application in a hearing aid are not yet clear

@Baltazard said:

I am not sure the average is 8 to 10 hours, if you have been on this forum it’s more like 14 to 18 hour.

This forum is full of odd-balls. Phonak has access to wear-time records of everyone wearing their products so their number is probably accurate.

edit: Nice to see that wear time for sphere is up. Nice indicator of a good product that people like to wear.

You are absolutely correct. That’s my experience - 14-18 hours a day (more like 24 hours, with 4-5 hours sleep on my schedule).

Are there other future applications of AI in hearing aids other than speech in noise?

I was recently able to use the spheric speech in loud noise program at four different airports. I found it to be a big improvement over the Paradise aids that I had previously. Airports were still a difficult listening environment because the primary source of noise was many people speaking at the same time. I found that I got the best performance by adjusting the speech focus to full forward to minimize voices that I did not want to hear.

@Bimodal_user said:

But does that mean that enabling Bluetooth LE in Infinios make them unable to receiving Bluetooth Classic signal? I ask because my smartphone already can broadcast Auracast and one-to-one LE signal.

It is technically possible but it is a matter of user complexity and priorities- we are always trying to make the best decisions about how to provide the best user experience and highest benefits now.

Audeo Life is somewhat waterproof, but it’s receivers don’t.

@hearingaidobserver1 said:

Are there other future applications of AI in hearing aids other than speech in noise?

Yes, we already have other applications of AI in our fitting software in predicting the optimal individual acoustic coupling. Also in the signal processing, AI can be applied for various types of tasks, specific speaker extraction, scene identification, feedback management, wind noise reduction…
Dr. Launer

@Baltazard said:

I am not sure the average is 8 to 10 hours, if you have been on this forum it’s more like 14 to 18 hour.

We are quoting some specific data from our hearing aid datalogging function. We see that there are plenty of “super users” who enjoy their hearing aids for 18-20 hours a day and the average use tends to increase as the technology improves, offering more benefit in more situations.

Thank you to Hearing Tracker for hosting this AMA and to all of you for some great discussions!

Thank you both @Stefanlauner and @christine.jones for joining us and for all of your great insights!! It was a pleasure.

@Steve_Taddei said:

Yes, we already have other applications of AI in our fitting software in predicting the optimal individual acoustic coupling.

Won’t this prediction be too conservative? For example, in a slightly different matter, because of the power receiver, Phonak Target still suggests me M receiver. I understand that my loss fits to its fitting range, however, my ear canal volume is probably too large to get desired SPL near the eardrum, so I need at least P receiver.

Thank you for listening