Oticon More random Restart

This has been happening to me. Pretty random, sometimes it happens a week apart, sometimes 3 weeks apart, either ear. It didn’t happen with the pair I initially bought, but one of them rusted out on the inside somehow, and both got replaced after about 6 months. The replacements are the ones that have been doing that. I haven’t thought much about it because it’s a minimal bother since it’s very quick from turning off to coming back on on its own, but I did mention it to my audiologist last week and he said to keep tabs on the frequency of it – if it happens too much, he’ll send them in for a fix or replacement.

I don’t have the More, I have the OPN, which is also Oticon but a couple of generations before the More. When I first got my OPNs, they would randomly restart without any rhythm and rhyme. But after a firmware or two or three, they no longer do it as much as before (which can be a few times a week), but once in a long while it can still happen.

As hearing aids get more and more complicated, it’s easier and easier for computations inside, or algorithms, of software-based memory stacking or memory leak to occur due to bugs and instability. Once things get to a certain point of no return (not recoverable anymore), the aids are designed to just restart. It’s not any different than your computer or apps on your smart phone getting hung, forcing you to reboot your PC or phone to clear things out. With the aids, I get there’s no on-the-fly interface you get like with the PC or phone, so they probably design it to just reboot when things are hung.

As to why your Siemens never did this but the More do it a lot more often, it may depend on the level of complexity in the designs. The More has been out for 2 years already, and there have been a number of firmware updates, so hopefully this type of random restart will get reported less and less.

I’m curious as to whether you’re exposed to complex environments often? I wonder if complex environments push the HAs to the limit until they fall off the brink and are forced to restart.

I’ve had occasions when I’m at home (simple environment) and my OPN would restart as well, so I don’t know…

I have Oticon Xceed, and I have same problem in one of specific places of my house. It is a bathroom, with mirrors at wall looking to my room with all streaming devices, and with Wi-Fi router behind opposite side wall.

@marath010 said:

This is expected behavior and not a defect

If it is expected that is a design fault in my opinion. It likely indicates a situation that should have been detected and better handled. The restart would be a last ditch workaround to the underlying problem.

@anon33641277 said:

Wi-Fi router

Perhaps the particular 2,4 GHz Wi/Fi channel interferes with the preferred wireless channel used by your hearing aids. Rebooting would permit a scan and selection of a different frequency. Setting your Wi-Fi router to a different unused channel may resolve this issue.

At least in the US only 3 of the 11 Wi-Fi channels are non-overlapping. I work with enterprise Wi-FI systems at work.

Likely the access points at work are automatically dynamically set by the underlying system based on the least interference detected. For home in the US channels 1, 6, and 11 are the non-interfering channels.

@user178 said:

Thank you all for your thoughts and insight, oddly enough, the first pair did not start this until 3-4 months after wearing, then became fairly consistent, yet random, they would perform well for weeks, then randomly shut down and restart. The second pair seemed to do the same as well as the loaners and the 3rd pair are doing this.

If this is a consistent pattern that you’re observing (works well for the first several weeks then starts acting flaky), I wonder if this may have to do with manufacturing tolerances or not. For example, if Oticon has decided to start loosening up their mfg tolerance requirement more recently and don’t bin as many parts (which don’t meet stricter tolerances but meet looser tolerances) as they should. Then over time, the degradation of performance due to the wear and tear of usage starts to trip up the aids and causing more frequent reboots. One possibility is that the memories used inside the aids may start faulting here and there and those faulty spots in the memories get blocked off one by one to disallow use of them. Maybe eventually too many get blacked out that there’s not enough memory space left to support the normal operation. Whenever an overflow condition occurs (maybe a lot more data get sampled and stacked up more than usual, maybe in a difficult listening environment), because there’s not enough memory space to hold data for the computation, the aids are forced to reboot themselves to clear everything out to start anew.

Of course this is only a very wild guess from the over-imagination of an engineer here and this speculation may not be true at all. But if this random reboot consistently starts very infrequently in the beginning but more and more frequent as time goes on, then it’s a plausible explanation.

It’s also possible that it’s a firmware bug where there are memory leaks due to sloppy codes that would cause memories to get unnecessarily filled up and not cleared out when the computations are done, causing the memories to overflow to a point of forcing a restart. But if it’s a firmware sloppy bug, then it would affect more people across the board and there would have been more complaints than usual.

And this is what troubles me, all of my research (and talking to my audiologist) indicate that I am an “anomaly” with this issue, no one else seems to have the same trouble as I. We’ve had the factory rep involved who thinks it may be a “memory dump” but it seems odd to me that 4 pair have done this under similar circumstances but at random intervals.

I have to assume at this point the fault lies with me and my environment somehow, changing the wi fi in my home is a first step, ensuring the firemware is updated is on the agenda also. Thank you all for your help, it is greatly appreciated !

@user178 said:

And this is what troubles me, all of my research (and talking to my audiologist) indicate that I am an “anomaly” with this issue, no one else seems to have the same trouble as I…

I have to assume at this point the fault lies with me and my environment somehow, changing the wi fi in my home is a first step, ensuring the firemware is updated is on the agenda also.

For sure the first priority if not done already is to make sure that you’re on the latest firmware update.

I’m not sure how you can change the wifi in your home. The only obvious thing is to use the 5 GHz bandwidth instead for your phone and laptop and such, if you’ve been using the 2.4 GHz bandwidth from your router for them. That’s because the 2.4 GHz is also the bandwidth use for communications on the More, just to minimize any possible interference. But if you have lots of wireless home devices like security cameras and door locks and wireless thermostat and such, most of those home wireless devices operate strictly on the 2.4 GHz band only, so you don’t really have an option to change those to a different band.

@Volusiano said:

I’m not sure how you can change the wifi in your home

Most all home routers have a web page to set them up.

Yeah, I’m aware of it. I just meant I’m not sure if there’s really much he can do to change his wifi router settings that would help eliminate possible interference, except to use the 5 GHz band on any devices that would work with 5 GHz to minimize 2.4 GHz communication with the router.

Most any serious programmer has encountered code that crashes only on some rare combination of circumstances. The same may be true here. More likely than Oticon deciding to loosen the tolerances on their circuitry, I think. @user178’s aids may have a combination of options set, that interacts with, say, his voice or his clothing or the jingling tags on his dog’s collar, to exercise a bug. The bug may even be in Oticon’s bug list, but it happens so infrequently and is so hard to pin down that they didn’t let it hold up the release.