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Oticon Real

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@Volusiano said:

Otherwise, they’d have to compromise with either a huge aid behind your ear, or maybe take the external brain approach that Whisper did.

@Volusiano: Or … have a yuge between-the-ears sound hearing brain like me.

In reply to @Um_bongo

@Um_bongo said:

Not necessarily; however in terms of steering, range, adaptation and learning parameters; pupil tracking would present a huge advantage. Imagine your audiologist just telling you to look in the direction you wanted to hear to listen to enhanced speech in that direction.

I actually saw Oticon do this at Denmark headquarters circa 2015. It was a neat party trick, but not something that they had miniaturized. They were actually talking about “what if we could do this with EEG sensors in a custom tip”, but the “demo” was really using pupil tracking at the time. Obviously they haven’t figured it out, but it must be on their radar. I’m not confident in the efficacy of using EEG, although I remember that those biofeedback ball games were popular at the time. Pupil tracking would be neat because theoretically it could do direction AND distance. At least, in a young person with good pupil accommodation.

Sorry, on the smartcharger? Or do you mean the battery in the hearing aid? Clinics may vary, but our chargers have the same warranties as the hearing aids and I believe the hearing aid rechargeable batteries have a one year warranty. Oticon batteries are serialized and swapped out in the clinic as compared to other manufacturer’s fully built-in Li-ion batteries. So with other manufactures, the battery warranty typically matches the hearing aid but once you are out of warranty changing that battery is a full repair cost, compared to the Oticon battery that can be changed in house for a lesser cost. That said, in my experience, other manufacturer batteries are going the distance for 5 years whereas the Oticon battery needs replacement every 1-2 years.

@Neville said:

in my experience, other manufacturer batteries are going the distance for 5 years whereas the Oticon battery needs replacement every 1-2 years.

@Neville: Thanks for taking the time to post this and for sharing your experience. This answers a lot of questions for me and explains my experience with my More hearing aids. I’m relieved to learn that my SmartCharger had a decent warranty, also, since I’ve already had reliability issues with mine.

In reply to @Neville

No GN rechargeable fitted here has lasted anything over 3 years without severely diminished performance.

We know the Phonak stuff comes out the door with a shorter daily life.

What are you currently fitting that does 1500 plus full day cycles? Starkey?

I’m not trying to be combative, and some of the Oticon/Bernafon struggle with capillary action from sweat through the drawer faces, but where you see this kind of life?

Edited

In reply to @Um_bongo

@Um_bongo: Thank you for taking the challenge to @Neville . I can’t speak for others, but getting half-way accurate information on things like device life (meaning # cycles) is one of the more problematic things to obtain , both here in the Forum, and elsewhere.

These quite disparate reports of service life stress me out a bit, and cast aspersions on the reliability of information gotten from . I mean - if your audiologist doesn’t have access to reliable information of this sort, who does?

So, I find it valuable when one trusted source of information here on the Forum challenges another. Who is right - but more importantly - whence the discrepancy? Is it from the makers’ side, or from genuinely different clinical experiences?

I, personally, am back to the starting line in terms of my confidence in the service life of my hearing devices and their accessories … all I’m asking for is to be told the approximate truth.

:confounded:

Best guess for me with the SmartCharger is to charge the aids once or twice with the charger unplugged and later plug in the charger to charge the battery. I think cycling it but not all the way will prolong battery life.

I was just saying how I was trying to maximize battery life because they tend to not like staying at a full charge. I was thinking of you since I know you use a smart charger too.

@prodigyplace: Thanks. I was posting about what is, for me, a larger issue. How do you get your to tell you the TRUTH about the durability and reliability of the products they sell us for big bucks? (And can you believe what they say?)

@SpudGunner said:

How do you get your HCP to tell you the TRUTH about the durability and reliability of the products they sell us

Do they even know the truth on the new flagship models? All they have is likely a small subset of historical data.

Edited

In reply to @Um_bongo

Ah, we haven’t done a lot of GN rechargeables, so that’s good to know. I’d have thought they’d be better with LE .

We’ve done a ton of Sonova since android compatibility came out, and since the z-power nightmare. Since the initial Belong rechargeables they’ve been pretty good (I had some 6 year old Belong rechargeables in the other day never sent for repair still fine, damn that on/off button). Original expected daily battery life was 33 hours with no streaming, and I don’t think our average patient is a HUGE streamer–except that even our rechargeable Skys have been okay and that generally includes at least 6 hours of streaming a day. We DO try to send them out for an end of warranty repair at the 3 year mark and have the battery replaced at that time. The Lumity has started coming up shorter on its battery day, but it hasn’t been out long here. The P rechargeable battery day was always junk. I have in my mind some sense that the manufacturers have also cracked down a bit on battery replacement? Early on they definitely just replaced it with new, but recently I’ve heard things like “we will replace with a functional battery of a similar age” but I don’t know who that is or if it’s true.

We do a lot of Oticon (and some Bernafon), but that’s a different battery. Starkey has been pretty good, though our heaviest use has been their rechargeable custom and I’m not sure its been out long enough to know. We haven’t done enough Widex rechargeables for me to make a judgement. Who am I forgetting? Oh, we haven’t noticed much trouble with Signia, but I also think we haven’t been fitting their rechargeables for long enough. I’m trying to remember the order of who had the Li-ion first. Everyone jumped on z-power except Phonak and. . . was Signia/Siemens another hold out? I don’t recall ever fitting a Siemens z-power, they almost still had their original removable rechargeable batteries back then–I know were were selling both gold and silver rechargeable batteries for a while.

@Neville: Which do you think is the more realistic take on Oticon’s rechargeable battery life, and on what basis? How can your and Stephen’s clinical experiences be at such variance?

Edited

@Neville: I’m reading things into posts that aren’t there … I mistakenly thought his practice was seeing longer Oticon battery life than yours. Sorry .

Honestly, Um bongo probably has a better data set on repairs than I as he is a clinic owner. Also, the data at this point is likely a bit fuzzy for a bunch of reasons: If I’m looking just at our 5 year+ rechargeable users, that was a very small population because rechargeable uptake started out as a trickle. Electronic filing opens up datamining options, but at the speed of healthcare this is also a little bit in its infancy (we’ve only finally made it to [almost] paperless in the last 3 years). Prior to newer electronic filing systems, a clinic would have to be very conscientious about maintaining good excel spread sheets to look into the fine details of their repair rates. In order to compare repairs across two manufacturers, clinics need to DO a considerable volume of each manufacturer (rather than just one or two), and yet independent clinics are also often smaller and may not have the time for that sort of detailed analysis compared to bigger outfits. So in many cases, clinicians probably just get a gut feeling about the reliability of a particular manufacturer, or a bad experience.

Manufacturers absolutely keep detailed data on their repair rates and types, but in my limited experience they don’t share those with us transparently. Maybe there’s corporate espionage among them to try to find out one another’s (“you said you loved me, but you just wanted my repair rate data!”). They don’t even consistently tell us what the cause for a particular repair was, and no matter what the main cause was I bet there will be incidental moisture damage.

@Neville: The lack of transparency on the makers’ parts isn’t surprising, I guess … It’s too bad for those of us trying to decide whether to relent to the pressure to "go rechargeable " or to hold out for disposable batteries. I’m more firm in the latter conviction than I ever was, but I suppose I’ll go the way of the analog hardnosers … like the dodo.

It’s a very predatory industry I find - the prey being the , a group of medically disabled individuals. To the makers’ shame!

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