ITE custom CROS

Is anyone even doing one where you are right now? Most of our custom CROSs seem to have been discontinued with no updated version available–all RICs. I think Signia will do a custom tip for the Silk CROS if you want and omnidirectional #10 battery (or I suppose the rechargeable right now too–though we’ve been having trouble with softwear programming connectivity with that one). I heard lately that the Phonak Belong custom CROS might still be available, though I’d thought it had been discontinued. If it IS still available, you’d be streaming through the compilot which I also thought was discontinued. I found Belong CROS ear-to-ear stability to be fine, but like all phonak CROSes the battery drain is very high.

Yeah, I do a lot of Roger stuff because I do pediatric audiology and also because our province has governmental funding for FMs which makes it way more affordable for the patient.

The Roger mic is a nice option for people with one ear that doesn’t function well because it supports them in noise and that sort of hearing asymmetry is really detrimental to speech-in-noise processing. I think of its job differently than I think of the CROS’s job, which is to provide access to the bad side so that the wearer doesn’t always feel like they are craning their neck around and losing access to that half of the world. Back a few years ago when Oticon didn’t have a CROS, they used to suggest that you could just get a remote mic and pin it to your bad side shoulder and that would be “the same”, but it really wasn’t and doing that with a Roger mic would be even less effective because it’s not really an omni directional mic. Additionally, when using any sort of remote mic you are flipping the hearing aids into the remote mic program and losing all of the automatic features. Similarly, you can use any set of two hearing aids that have an acoustic phone program with ear-to-ear streaming (i.e. for the purpose of picking up the sound from your landline phone on one side and streaming it across to the other ear) to hack an “ampCROS” program to stream sound from one ear to the other in a CROS-like way, but again when you are in that program you lose all the other features. So an ampCROS can be effective if the user wants to use a CROS-like program very situationally, but isn’t great for constant use. So in short:

Roger–>Speech in noise, streaming individual speech or small group speech into hearing aid
AmpCROS–>occassional CROS use, generally used when one would want a CROS sometimes but also want to provide amplification to the bad ear to maintain nerve activity and support potential future CI outcomes
CROS–>all-day access to the “bad” side while maintaining hearing aid features

If you want the third option, nothing but a CROS will do. If you just want speech in noise support along with the ability to situationally point your mic at someone on your bad side or have an individual wear the mic to stream into your ear, the Roger will work well. The battery drain will certainly be higher, but not as high as smartphone bluetooth streaming–similar to battery drain with a regular CROS, actually. CROS or Roger life on a 312 battery is poor (based on 8-hours a day of Roger use, which we see in student classroom situations but may not be your situation), and you can expect to change it every 3 days or so which might be fine depending on how easy that is for you. If you were interested in a custom and a Roger that you would use for 8 hours a day, you might want to wait for the custom rechargeables.

Roger is compatible with all modern Phonak and Unitron hearing aids, and compatible with a middle man with most other hearing aids either through their t-coil program or via some other device like the resound multimic. The audio isn’t as good through the t-coil program.