Oticon Intent user review

I don’t know i haven’t even had much luck at getting printbouts of my audiograms, my audiologist just looked the other way while i take a picture of the screen with my audiogram showing. Or he steps away and I copy the numbers. That whole clinic is very stinchy with the use of printers and printer paper.

Would you know how the MoreSound Intelligence is setup? I opted to go with the maximum noise reduction for easy and difficult environments given my loss and are very happy with it particularly in loud places where the voices do stand out. I’m also looking forward to the smart charger.

Great to hear things are working out for you.

Given your heavy hearing losses, I think using the highest available max NNS for Difficult is appropriate. For Easy, as long as you don’t perceive a reduction in speech quality, I think it’s OK to leave it on the higher value, too.

Otherwise, your question is a little unclear about how MSI is set up.

The MoreSound didn’t help me any, the SoundBoost for my Real1 aids helped some.
My understanding it has to do with directional sound in front of you.

@cvkemp said:

I don’t know i haven’t even had much luck at getting printbouts of my audiograms, my audiologist just looked the other way while i take a picture of the screen with my audiogram showing. Or he steps away and I copy the numbers. That whole clinic is very stinchy with the use of printers and printer paper.

You can get a copy of your audiogram from the Medical Records office.
Since you have a small clinic, they may have to send them via snail mail.

The medical records here is in Little Rock I have been told. I have had to go to clinics there a few times, and prefer having teeth pulled than making that drive.

@cvkemp said:

I have had to go to clinics there a few times, and prefer having teeth pulled than making that drive.

You still have teeth?
Ask your audi to have records send you a copy. I don’t think you’d have to make that trip.
Too bad My HealtheVet doesn’t have access to audiograms.

@flashb1024 said:

You can get a copy of your audiogram from the Medical Records office.
Since you have a small clinic, they may have to send them via snail mail.

Would they be included in a blue button dump?

WH

@Luga said:

I have been also wondering how Oticon classifies something like road noise in a car which is my biggest challenge. I suspect that is classified as “simple” since they have a picture of a fan in the screen if I remember correctly. If that was classified as “difficult ” then I would dial back on the simple noise reduction to see. I plan to experiment on this. Do you know if Oticon has published examples of the noise classification?

I also expect that having maxed out these noise reduction values probably render the Speech Booster benefit less noticeable since I don’t perceive a change in sound when I turn this on.

Oticon has been confusing in explaining on various occasions what their MoreSound Booster does. But the principal idea is that they would apply Full Directional for frontal beam forming, and most likely also max out on their max NNS value for Difficult. So yeah, that’s probably why you don’t notice a big difference with it ON if your default program already has the highest max NNS set just the same way. Although your default program is set to Neural Automatic instead of Full Directional, if it were smart enough in Neural Automatic, it should switch to Full Directional just the same when you need it to do so, so that’s also consistent with why you don’t notice much difference between the 2 in the first place.

As for the topic of how the Oticon aids treat road noise, they use a beam forming method called MVDR (Minimum Variance Distortion-less Response) to treat dominant noise sources like road noise in what they call the Intent-based Spatial Balancer module before the treated signal is fed into the NNS module. See figure 3 and 4 below with its explanation, and the second screenshot to see where the Intent-based Spatial Balancer is located in the MSI 3.0.

So it definitely is only treated in the Difficult section. You can dial back the max NNS in the Easy/Simple section to see if it helps with anything else when you’re not in the road noise scenario.

The way Oticon classifies the 5 different environment classifications is by using a noise estimator. If there is car noise around you, you wouldn’t be in Very Simple or Simple in the first place. It would most likely have to be Moderate at least. So unless you specify Moderate in your Easy grouping, the car noise would be treated in the Spatial Balancer. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be treated and attenuated at all by the Virtual Outer Ear if you had classified Moderate in the Easy group.

The VOE is only about shaping the response of the sounds to mimic how they would be shaped by your real ears (3 different types of ear). If there were any kind of natural sound attenuation at all, you can make pretend like you have the kind of ears that would block out the car sounds because its pinna shape would give it the most front focus (hence the Focus value) → probably the ear pinna shape that tends to stick out the most when looking from in front of the face. If the car sound is coming from in front of you, however, this would make it worse and not help. The Aware value would mimic the most omnidirectional type of ears, which I guess would be the kind of ear pinna that hugs very close to the head and doesn’t stick out when looking from in front of the face.

@WhiteHat said:

Would they be included in a blue button dump?

The last time I did a blue button dump there was nothing from audiology other than updates on visits for adjustments.
That’s the problem. No audiograms unless they’ve recently changed it.

@Luga said:

I originally thought road noise to be simple because I perceived it to be constant and all around me… think of windows closed, a/c going in low and tire noise on the road at highway speed while someone to your right speaks as you are looking forward; not so much a complex traffic situation with the windows open, horns honking, etc. In my case the drum of the tires tends to drown out the speaker which makes me look at them. The Intents have improved on this noticeably as compared with the Reals which I attributed to the increased NNS. Your explanation above helps clarify.

Just a side note: you’ll find some useful information in the “data logging” tab in Genie 2. I think you could save your session, go for a ride, and then reopen it to check how the Intents classified that period.

and @cvkemp, there is an option to export all your data from Genie 2 to a PDF file, which could be emailed to you. See the “save pdf” option below

@Luga said:

In my case the drum of the tires tends to drown out the speaker which makes me look at them. The Intents have improved on this noticeably as compared with the Reals which I attributed to the increased NNS. Your explanation above helps clarify.

The Spatial Balancer uses the MVDR beam forming to attenuate dominant noise sources first, but if it’s not all gone, the NNS in Difficult can “rebalance” the remaining left-over unattenuated noises to help further with the speech. That’s probably the difference you hear between the Real and the Intent → the DNN 2.0 on the Intent probably does a better job rebalancing the speech in the NNS over the noise than the Real’s DNN 1.0.

@e1405 said:

I think you could save your session, go for a ride, and then reopen it to check how the Intents classified that period.

Great point. Will do that.

Thank you for posting these screenshots of the Oticon software. Are these the configuration screens that the user gets access to, or is access limited to the audiologist during a consultation? I ask because I currently have bernafons and the amount of configuration is really limited to end users and this looks exactly like what I’d like to be able to experiment with to fine tune my settings. I don’t want to have to return to a clinic to make every change!