Feature in Brief: Binaural OneMic Directionality

What it is

As another world’s first, binaural OneMic directionality allows even single-microphone hearing aid wearers to experience the benefits of automatic directionality. Combined with the natural pinna effects, they can now enjoy improved speech understanding in noisy situations while benefiting from non-directional processing in other situations without any manual interaction.

How it works

Traditional technology for generating advanced, automatic directionality relies upon multiple microphones on the same housing. In single-microphone instruments, however, automatic directionality has not been possible. With the advent of e2e wireless 3.0, the two hearing aids in a bilateral pair can now share acoustic information with each other. This means the signals received by the microphones in single-microphone instruments can now also be processed similar to as if there were two microphones on each aid. As a result, binax is able to offer binaural OneMic directionality, an automatic, adaptive, multichannel directional technology dedicated to singlemicrophone hearing instruments.

As a part of the automatic microphone system, binaural OneMic directionality is integrated in the Universal program in CICs and other single-microphone 7bx Insio instruments. It fades in from the omni-directional mode automatically in noisy situations to help improve speech understanding, and is adaptive in 48 channels.

Availability

Binaural OneMic directionality is available in singlemicrophone Insio 7bx hearing instruments with e2e wireless 3.0. In those instruments, it is checked by default in the automatic Universal program. Of course it can also be enabled in other dedicated programs.