Oticon & the Business of Hearing Aids

Fitting Assistant: Oops, you’re right, of course.

@Volusiano said:

I wonder if the HearSuite software does the same thing or not (still available via an Updater for existing installed earlier versions)?

Yes, HearSuite has an updater.

I may have the installer in the recycle bin on my PC at home. I’m away and won’t be home for a week.

@kevels55 said:

I think you will find the largest hearing aid market in the world is probably China? With a population of around 1.3 Billion, its fair to say, they would have a fairly significant HOH population… I have in the past read several articles on Chinese Hearing Care, most Cities in China have around 6 or 7 large dispensaries, they have several large hearing aid manufacturers, where they make their own home-brew hearing aids, and TBH most don’t look much different from what we buy in the west…I would imagine “The main difference”, will be price… China being China, they are excellent copiers, and intellectual property, probably doesn’t mean a lot to them, probably they only see a problem & solution, much of the West’s hearing aid manufacturing, is outsourced right in their own back yard… So it is easy for them to reverse engineer, and make their own, then call it whatever? In fact, when I think about it, all they have to do is employ the software engineers & hearing aid engineers, whom are working on the outsourcing work, and they now have an instant result, and a new line in hearing aids… I don’t think they export their aids though? So any intellectual properties acquired, will probably not be seen outside China, but their R & D is most likely at the bare minimum end, and this is no doubt reflected on the price…

Just saw it and thought it was interesting~
None of this is true.
China has a huge population, but only the greatest potential for hearing aids, not the largest hearing aid market, because of the impact of people’s perceptions of hearing aids, and the fact that they can’t afford them …
The biggest hearing aid markets are North America and Western Europe, as you should be able to see from the annual public sales figures.
Reverse engineering hearing aids is not a reality, in fact there have always been IC design companies that offer generic hearing aid IC kits and development tools, which make it easy to design hearing aid hardware, and there is no need to reverse engineer the hardware side of the equation at all.
I believe that the top 5 hearing aid companies do not design and produce their own hearing aid ICs, but rather customize ICs from IC companies to meet their requirements.
In fact, the core technology of the top 5 hearing aid companies is not in the hardware, but in the hearing aid algorithms that have been accumulated through decades of research, which is what the Chinese companies are unable to reverse and surpass.
The top 5 hearing aid companies have production lines in China, some from more than two decades ago, but the Chinese government doesn’t care about hearing aids at all …
In the Chinese brand six brands together with the brand monopoly position, some Chinese brands also used to launch their own design of good hearing aids, but the Chinese market for their brand and price recognition is not high, sales are very few, and now they basically turned to the Chinese market to sell from the 5 big hearing aid companies products labeled from the hearing aids.
Some Chinese brands have been selling their hearing aids internationally for years, but they avoided competing in the major markets of the Big 5 companies’ brands, so are less known, and in recent years some of the newer companies are mainly producing and selling OTC-like products.
BTW, you have so many misconceptions about China, not only in hearing aids.
@kevels55 @Volusiano

even Genie 2017 have a fitting assistance - in fact even the otiset had fitting assitant

The Oticon Polaris chip is indeed designed by Oticon (WD) and fabbed by TSMC. Here is a link related to the launch of the More line.

https://esg.tsmc.com/en/update/innovationAndService/caseStudy/31/index.html9

It is fabbed in 28nm which is about 5 generations from leading edge (First produced in 2011) and does not require EUV machines and is significantly cheaper to design/manufacture (Less mask steps).

I would with high confidence predict the Oticon Mores and Philips 9030 share the same Polaris chip, and the Oticon Real and Philips 9040 share the same Polaris R’ chip set. It would not make economic sense to have different chip runs. I would go even further and expect the PCB boards of the two are identical. I think there are minor differences are in shell/button, and different firmware, but the fundamental software must be the same given the chipset contains the DNN processor.

@billgem said:

One Costco HCP told me recently that the HearLink is just a Bernafon with a new name. So, there you have the rumor mill which runs on its own energy.

I’ve had an extensive look online and cannot find a single difference between the Bernafon Alpha XT 9 hearing aid and Philips HearLink 9040: I’m talking features/specs/options, physical appearance, accessories, software (both fitter and user), etc etc. - well, nothing other than extensive rebadging/re-skinning and of course renaming of features. Can anyone prove me wrong?

@Volusiano said:

Did you find any mention of the Sudden Sound stabilizer feature in the Bernafon Alpha XT 9?

I believe Bernafon refer to it as “transient noise” in their marketing material.

@Volusiano said:

Did you find any mention of the Sudden Sound stabilizer feature in the Bernafon Alpha XT 9?

I read through its brochure and I found mention of the Wind & Handling noise feature, but I didn’t see anything on it that mentions the sudden noise feature.

Maybe,

“. . . the new Smart Noise Reduction within Hybrid Noise Management has been trained by machine learning to apply the correct amount of noise reduction to specific situations. Hybrid Balancing supplies the Noise Balancer and Speech Balancer tools to adjust the contrast between speech and noise.”

Different vocabulary. Who knows what it means? No mention of a DNN in Bernafon materials. No direct mention of AI other than the machine learning comment. See the link for more details:

Bernafon hearing aids | Hear your day, your way

Rechargeable Bernafon hearing aids. It’s your hearing. Let’s make it work for you. Bernafon hearing aids match your needs, your lifestyle, and your budget…

The first screenshot below is the Philips chart for its AI Noise Removal from its technical whitepaper. Noisy speech input goes into the AI-NR block, and less noisy speech comes out at the observed output. In the training scenario, this observed output is compared against the “Speech alone” ideal output and the differences are fed back into the AI for learning adjustment to make future noise removal incrementally better.

The second screenshot is from the Bernafon Alpha XT 9 marketing brochure. It clearly said that its Smart Noise Reduction feature generates cleaner speech signal through machine learning.

So the 2 common factors between the 2 aids’ brands are that it’s based on machine learning, and the learning is trained to generate cleaner speech output by removing the noise from it. The diagrams don’t look the same, but at least the wordings have some commonality in it.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////