Oticon Announces Oticon Intent™, the World’s First Hearing Aid with User-Intent Sensors

Generally, people with severe low frequency loss like yours (to profound in mid and high) don’t have enough margin left in their hearing dynamic range to do well when there are too many sounds competing with each other, because strong amplification is needed for almost all sounds, so there’s no room to convey volume nuances between them to help you discern the sounds from each other, which is a crucial criteria to allow your brain to do the filtering between them to help you focus on what you want to hear and ignore what you don’t want to hear. Otherwise, you’re kinda forced to have to hear everything loudly at the same volume. The audibility nuances of low and mid frequency components of the sounds are vital for this ability to sort out the sounds.

If you’re still on trial period with the Oticon Intent, I’d suggest that you might want to try something else like the new Phonak Sphere hearing aids. That’s because the open paradigm embraced by Oticon to let all sounds in might not be as suitable for your type of hearing loss for the reason I explained above. Phonak does not subscribe to the open paradigm like Oticon does and can be more aggressive in filtering more sounds to give you a better speech priority compared to Oticon.

If you’re already pass the trial period with the Intent 1, sure, you can try to DIY to see if you can get better results than your HCP can or not, but be careful and keep the original settings to come back to it as the starting point if your experiments go down the wrong paths. You can play around with the Neural Noise Suppression values, the environmental configurations, and the Directionality Settings (with the Fully Directional value) to see if they help. There’s also a Fitting Assistant functionality available in Genie 2 where you can opt to answer a number of questions and the Fitting Assistant will adjust the settings based on your answers for you.