Signia Introduces Hearing Aids That Tackle the Most Difficult Challenge for People With Hearing Loss: Group Conversations in Noise

Interesting!

Look forward to learningmore.

DaveL
Toronto

Problem is, every single HA manufacturer makes the same claim, in fact they have been saying it since 1960! We’re still waiting for this miracle.

And many mid-age people with good hearing have this difficulty. It’s only the young who don’t struggle in noisy environments.

I remain… skeptical. There is nothing in their press release to make me think that’s anything but a noise suppression, “zoom” type processor at work. Which all the biggies have.

Let’s see how they work in real life when they’re released.

Yes, time will tell whether this is a gimmick or not. On the one hand the factual claims are quite clear. It will facilitate hearing in groups where there is background noise and there is the ability to track speakers of interest. On the other hand the scientific evidence presented is just that there is a “significant” improvement and a claim of better performance. But no data behind that claim, like any increase in signal to noise ratio. Also, no independent or comparative studies or white papers that we can see (although it does reference one). This has me worried. Could it be that they have achieved solving one aspect of the problem, but only for people with a mild to moderate loss? We also know that some people have quite different pathology with respect to hearing in background noise. Two people can have the same audiogram but very different performance in speech in noise comprehension.

Not wanting to be pessimistic, but this is a wait and see.

I don’t think that this is surprising. The computer chips behind hearing aid technology have been progressing so rapidly that they are capable of doing things that were unthinkable just a few years ago. Frankly I think that hearing aids from all companies are moving forward by leaps and bounds and we will continue to see rapid progress.

With regard to Signia specifically, their last platform, AX (augmented xperience) introduced dual processors - one to process the focus stream (speech in front) and another to process background noise (surrounding sound) separately before the two streams are reunited and delivered to the wearer. According to Doctor Cliff this approach is unique among current hearing aids and is potentially groundbreaking. This new IX platform has found a way to identify speech from multiple directions and to process 4 steams while still splitting speech from background noise and processing them separately. (See white paper linked below.)

Signia White Paper: Power the conversation with Signia Integrated Xperience...4

Results from a study on the perceptual effects show that a significant improvement in speech understanding is offered by RealTime Conversation Enhancement.

If only it was true in the real world, if the AX (which I’ve used) was truely “groundbreaking” every manufacturer would be doing it, it didn’t work out for them with selling as the “best selling” HA that nailed the holy grail of hearing, and now they’re trying again with the IX, splitting into 2 processes and now 4, make it 8 or whatever, reminds me of this smart phone madness,as in who has the smartest, the numbers they throw around is almost unbelievable every new model has 16GB or 18GB ram ( I think I’ve seen 24GB!) multi-core processors blah blah, you know what, the best selling HAs are the ones with the biggest marketing department pushing all this fluff around in the room trying to find someone to suck it all up, I’m thinking Oticon is on to something when they claim that we “hear with our brains” !

Yes, Oticon is right about that. We hear with the brain. The brain is the most powerful computer. But information comes to brain through a damaged cochlea, where most of the information is lost. CI is also bad at this. So marketing is only good for moderate hearing loss, and there is little hope for profound hearing loss.

AX platform already has some of it in the form of “Augmented Focus” and it’s nothing special, I prefer to have it turned off most of the time. And it’s nothing like their provided samples, produced in lab environment.

But what happens when you have 10 “real people” talking in a 15’ radius - - not a background noise coming from a speaker??? Very poor demo to make me think this will work.
By the way I wear Signia because their “focus” property does HELP, but not enough.

Maybe not special for you, @Reginald, but it has been special for me.

BTW, what is it that you are turning off?

I prefer “hear with our ears, listen with our brains”