DIY - Self Programming the Oticon Opn – How To

@jferris33 said:

Can you tell me what the portions of the graph shaded in red and blue represent?

@TRY said:

If you mean the vertical colored bands, those are the destination frequencies of the Speech Rescue function. The vertical gray band, which in your graph is all the way to the right, shows the source frequencies for Speech Rescue.

You might have noticed, too, that there are up to 10 different Speech Rescue configurations (see table below). I don’t know how it comes to pick which configuration based on your hearing profile, but it looks like it picked configuration 8 or 9 for you. In my case it picked configuration 1 for my left ear but configuration 9 for my right ear. That resulted in hearing the lowered sounds differently to me. So I manually changed the right ear setting to configuration 1 to match with my left ear setting. You can definitely try different configuration and see which one you like the best. I like configuration 1 the best because that’s the lowest destination band I can set where I can hear the lowered sounds the most clearly.

SAVING THE HISTORY OF DIFFERENT SETTING SETS IN GENIE2

I like to save the settings sets for various experiments with my OPNs, so that can always go back to them, but there is no File/Save As feature—no built-in way to save the previous state of the aids or a snapshot of a session once you start that session. However there is a simple work-around that I’d like to share, and this work-around simply involves copying a client and renaming it appropriately before connecting to the aids.

As DIYers, most will have only one real client, ourselves, but we can use Genie2’s database of clients to hold many different setting sets for that same client. Assuming you already have one client entered, copy it via the exporting and then importing processes found as drop down choices in the top horizontal menu choice Genie. That’s Genie/Export Selected Client Files. Give it the temporary file a name (or accept the default “SelectedClients.nhax”). Then click Genie/Import Client Files, and point to that file.

At that point, you will have two instances of that one dataset shown as two clients with identical names. (It does not add a (1) at the end like Windows does for duplicate files.) Next edit the client and rename the last name and/or first name in a way to indicate the date or the purpose of the session, f.g. “9-6-17, added Speech Rescue to P3”.

After that, detect or connect to the aids and make your intended changes. If you ultimately make more changes than planned, after ending the fitting, disconnect and edit the client name again to reflect a proper description.

If desired, you easily build several experiments to test before you even get your MiniPro out of the box, and try them all out in the same hook-up session.

@TRY said:

a simple work-around that I’d like to share, and this work-around simply involves copying a client and renaming it appropriately before connecting to the aids.

I just use a unique session name within the same client name. For example, Client=pvc, Session=(pvc Original Settings). Start the fitting, get the settings from database, or from the hearing aids, make no changes during the fitting, then at the end save the settings into the database (with no changes) into Session name= (pvc Original Settings) or whatever session name you choose.

@pvc said:

…then at the end save the settings into the database (with no changes) into Session name…

This is what I can’t seem to do. I’ve got Genie2 open (but I’m not hooked up, presently), amd I don’t see or recall any opportunity to save into a new session name. My client list does have a column for last session, but it is automatically populated with date and time. Is this perhaps a NOAH option, and do you have NOAH?

PVC,

Your description of the session naming process is exactly what I do with mine. At the end of each session I just type in a comment that describes the changes I made, then next time I can just select that session from a list of previous sessions that comes up when I select the client.

I think that your pictures cover what you are describing very well but I will be happy to provide some if you still want me to.

When starting a new DIY session from already programmed aids, do you need the session file from your audiologist or can you pull the data directly from the hearing aids? (Including REM, specific frequency gain tweaks, etc.)

gkumar,

As best I can tell the Genie 2 software will pull the existing program from your aids when you first connect them. When you finish your fitting session you can then choose to save any changes to your data base (local, not NOAH) and/or the aids themselves. See PVCs pictures above - it shows check boxes where you can determine what will get saved.

You do need to fill set up a client file and fill out an audiogram with your numbers before you start a session. As I learned earlier, you can input the AC (air conduction) readings from your audiogram into the one in Genie 2. I’m not sure about other numbers from your audiogram - maybe someone else can chime in on that part.

Fred,

Thanks very much for that info on the audiological graph that Genie 2 displays. I think that I am making progress in learning how to use some of the tools in the Genie software.

After Genie has programmed your aids, you should just leave them like that for a week or two. If then you feel something isn’t right, try using the Fitting Assistant for your first adjustments. It really beats taking wild guesses. Plus you get to see how the correction is being applied.

Keep us posted.

Fred,

Sounds like good advice.

I have been tinkering with my programming for a couple of months now just trying out different things. Most recently I have turned on speech recovery. I have setup program 4 for bird watching and have boosted the high frequency bands quite a bit because a number of birds have calls that are too high frequency for me to hear. I am hoping that speech recovery might help with this by transposing the higher frequencies down to where I can hear them.

Oops, you are correct that it should be called Speech Rescue, not Speech Recovery.

That’s a good suggestion about having two programs - one with SR turned on and one with it off. I do have a music program as #3 which doesn’t use SR so I might use that as a comparison and see how it works.

As for birds, I agree that I am now hearing all kinds of high frequency sounds that I just couldn’t near before. The reason I kicked up the high frequencies on my bird program was so that I can hear not only bird calls that are very high frequency but also distant bird calls that are very faint. The problem is that it is hard to sort out the bird calls from any other sounds that are present - this only really works if I am in a very quiet environment (out in the woods) with little or no background sound. This is still a work in progress and I will be experimenting with the bird program for some time to come.

@MDB said:

I haven’t looked closely at Speech Rescue, but just from a quick look at the fitting assistant that Joshua Alexander (Audiology Online, 20Q series on Frequency Lowering), it doesn’t look like Speech Rescue does what I would consider transposition. To me transposition would keep the musical relationship between notes. It looks like Speech Rescue just copies and pastes say 4000-5000hz down to 2000-3000hz whereas “transposition” (my sense) would halve it to 2000-2500hz. I know there’s more to Speech Rescue than that in that it also leaves the original frequencies in place and it splits them up into two or three sections, but mainly I’m interested in the musical relationship. A side note. I did I search on frequency lowering on this site and ran across some good discussions. One guy referenced a device made for bird watchers (listeners?) that transposes the bird song down. Gives the option for 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4. Their website has great examples.

It’s not so much about musical relationship, but it’s about the natural selectivity of the cochlear. They don’t do it randomly or arbitrarily like you think. There’s definitely a science to their method of translation and composition. I think the goal by doing this is to minimize the distortion of the lowered signal. Below is an excerpt from their white paper that best describes it:

The specific Speech Rescue settings complement the natural frequency selectivity of the cochlea. The frequency selectivity is determined by the width of cochlear bandpass filters (auditory filters). Their widths, measured in ERB (equivalent rectangular bandwidth), increase approxi- mately logarithmically towards higher frequencies (the base of the cochlear). Following this natural perceptual arrangement, Speech Rescue captures several high-fre- quency bands and re-codes them in a lower-frequency band according to a logarithmic scale. Consequently, on a perceptual frequency axis the width of the destination regions (~ 3 ERB) is only a little smaller than the width of the source regions (4-5 ERB) (see log scale in Fig. 3b). This arrangement thus introduces minimal distortion of the lowered signal.

I have found an easy way to do some testing of the Speech Rescue feature. There is a web site that is just a tone generator that you can use to play back a tone at any frequency that you specify. The web site is here:

Online Tone Generator6

Simply enter your desired frequency and press play to hear your tone. It's free, simple and easy to use.

I find that with Speech Rescue turned on I can hear tones in the range of 6,000 to 9,000 Hertz that I cannot hear at all with SR turned off. The tones that I hear are of course pitched at a lower frequency since they are being transposed by the Speed Rescue feature. I am currently using Speech Rescue setting #9 which seems to work fairly well for me but I need to try some others as was discussed previously by Volusiano.

I was surprised that the range of the Oticon OPN extends all the way up to 9,000 Hertz - that is considerably higher than my previous hearing aids could reach. I did try 10,000 Hertz but could not hear anything there so the upper limit must be somewhere around 9.000 Hertz.

Also try the hearing test portion of that same web site which is here:

http://onlinetonegenerator.com/hearingtest.html93

This plays a sweep of frequencies from zero to as high as you can hear. I just tried it with SR turned on and as the frequencies swept up I could hear my aids transposing the upper frequencies - very cool…

@jferris33 said:

I was surprised that the range of the Oticon OPN extends all the way up to 9,000 Hertz - that is considerably higher than my previous hearing aids could reach. I did try 10,000 Hertz but could not hear anything there so the upper limit must be somewhere around 9.000 Hertz.

This is consistent with what is in that table of the 10 configurations that I showed in one of the earlier posts in this thread. As you can see in there, the source frequencies of configuration 10 (the highest source band) is only up to the 9Khz range.