X

Improving communication with face masks

The use of masks and increased distancing while talking because of the coronavirus pandemic is a unique challenge that can be very frustrating even for people with normal hearing. But for the hard of hearing it can prove especially difficult. Signia offers flexible solutions for you as a Hearing Care Professional (HCP) to optimize speech intelligibility in this “new normal” world. This new audiology bulletin explains the adverse effects of masks and social distancing on speech understanding and how HCPs can improve their clients’ hearing experience with the right advice and program settings in Connexx.

Read more

StreamLine Mic

The StreamLine Mic from Signia is a versatile Bluetooth streaming device and remote microphone all in one. Its Bluetooth functionality allows it to pair to multiple Bluetooth enabled devices including Android and iOS (Apple) devices. And the remote microphone capabilities help make even though most difficult listening situations easier to manage. This white paper examines advantages and the performance of the StreamLine Mic

Read more

Tinnitus Sound Therapy Trial Shows Effectiveness for Those with Tinnitus

This study demonstrates the benefit of partial masking, encouraging patients to seek help from audiologists interested in providing support for tinnitus patients. Thirty-three percent of our participants with bothersome tinnitus benefited from maskers provided through Signia instruments without any counseling whatsoever. Within that responsive group, 38–75% of them experienced improved quality of life in the domains of thoughts and emotions, sleep, concentration, and hearing.

Jun 14, 2019

Read more

Benefit of Using Telecare for Dementia Patients with Hearing Loss and Their Caregivers

A large portion of individuals with dementia also have hearing loss. When these patients are fitted with hearing aids for the first time, the use and operation of the instruments can be a struggle, and the struggle often carries over to their caregivers. This research found that the use of teleaudiology via Signia TeleCare for these new hearing aid users increased awareness, improved benefit for several different communication settings, and reduced associated stress for the caregivers.

May 21, 2019

Read more

Industry Research: Clinical Comparison of Premier Hearing Aids

Premier hearing aid products from three leading manufacturers were placed in head-to-head competition to assess key benefits for the wearer. For the speech recognition measures, the Signia product was significantly superior, and this was true for three different background noise conditions. Subjective judgements for different attributes of the listening experience were equal for the three products, suggesting that superior speech understanding can be achieved without causing negative effects regarding the acoustic environment.

VOL. 6 • ISSUE 4 • 2019

Read more

Achieving Excellence In Customer Service with TeleCare

One of the main concerns of Hearing Care Professionals (HCPs) who are fitting and dispensing hearing aids is knowing how to achieve excellence in patient service. A study involving 88 HCPs and more than 5600 first time users revealed the benefit of Signia TeleCare in creating higher hearing aid adoption rates with patients. The use of TeleCare was also found to result in high user satisfaction ratings in all the most relevant hearing situations for the individuals. The findings showed that a careful and consistent implementation as part of the HCP’s patient care workflow was key to leverage the remote care potentials provided by Signia TeleCare.

Read more

Closing the Open Fitting: An Effective Method to Optimize Speech Understanding

The findings of this research clearly show that the coupling system chosen by the HCP can have a substantial effect on subsequent speech understanding in background noise for the patient. The mean additional signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) benefit for a closed fitting was 3 dB, which corresponds to an impressive improvement in speech understanding of approximately 50%. This constitutes a significant advantage for the patient’s daily life in terms of social interaction. This benefit should not easily be foregone, especially in light of the clinically proven high acceptance of closed fittings based on the patient’s improved perception of his or her own voice as a result of Signia Own Voice Processing.

The Hearing Review, March 21, 2019

Read more

Comparison of streamed audio signal quality: what matters in the real world

Few manufacturers offer technology that incorporates both bilateral full-audio sharing of signals as well as direct streaming from a mobile device. In a comparative research project, the effectiveness of the streaming for such hearing aids was evaluated. The findings reveal a crucial difference between streaming indoors and outdoors, which is important to consider when counseling patients. Results show a substantial streaming advantage for the Signia product, and indicate that a Bluetooth based wireless approach as applied by the competitor brand does not deliver on all basic user needs.

Read more

Signia Nx Proven Benefits

Our goal at Signia has always been to allow our patients to live their lives to the fullest despite hearing loss. Therefore, we develop hearing solutions designed to ease and facilitate communication in a variety of listening situations. This paper describes several of our advanced features on the Nx platform and corresponding studies that demonstrate clinically proven benefit to patients.

Read more

Signia: Pioneers in Machine Learning Hearing Aids

It’s debatable whether a computer will ever “think” in the same way that the human brain does, but machines’ abilities to see, understand, and interact are changing our lives. It is no surprise then, that in the past few years we have seen mention of machine learning in hearing aid trade journal articles. But are machine learning hearing aids really something new?

Read more

Better Speech Understanding with Signia Nx CROS/BiCROS Instruments

Patients with SSD often experience significant problems with speech understanding in daily listening situations where noise is a factor. The results of this study demonstrate that the two latest CROS/BiCROS solutions offered by Signia, the Pure 312 Nx CROS with Narrow Directionality and the Silk Nx CROS, provide clear and significant speech intelligibility benefits for users in challenging listening environments.

Read more

How to use AutoFit (IMC2)

AutoFit™ is a beneficial feature in the Connexx™ Fitting Application that automatically provides the Hearing Care Professional (HCP) with an optimized real-ear insertion gain (REIG) setting without the need for the HCP to manually match targets. This paper describes how to perform quick match-to-target fittings using AutoFit from Connexx Version 8.5 onwards.

Read more

3D Classifier

At first glance, a tiny hearing aid and a self-driving car don’t have much in common. However, on a technological level there are a couple of similarities: self driving cars use a variety of sensors to collect real-time information about the environment such as GPS, optical cameras, specialised radar, and accelerometers.

Read more

The Trouble with Open

We have been taught that the occlusion effect often is the culprit in own voice issues, so why is it that with the prevalence of open fittings, patient dissatisfaction with the sound of their own voice is still an obstacle to hearing aid acceptance?

Read more

A Comparison of Feedback Cancellation Systems in Premier Hearing Aids

This Hearing Review publication reports on a study which uses three tests to evaluate the various aspects of hearing aid performance directly affected by the FBC: Aided Gain Before Feedback, Max-REIG, and a sound quality evaluation using Multi-Stimulus Test with Hidden Reference and Anchor (MUSHRA). Considering all potential trade-offs, the Signia FBC can be considered a best-in-class algorithm in this multifaceted benchmark analysis.

Hearing Review

Read more

The art of designing Pure Charge&Go Nx

Connectivity is undoubtedly one of the most im-portant topics in the hearing aid industry today. While most people immediately associate the word connectivity with being able to link their hearing aids with electronic devices such as smartphones, in a genuinely patient-centric hearing system the ap-plication of connectivity encompasses more than simply connecting to personal electronic devices.

Read more

Full Live remote Tuning Video

Since the introduction of TeleCare, anonymous analytics data shows that there have been more than 150,000 patient-professional interactions around the world, including 5,000 remote tuning interactions. With this large amount of data available, valuable insights can be deduced to help hearing care professionals improve their service and business success. Learn what Signia TeleCare can do for your practice and what's new with version 3.0.

Read more

Signia Nx Sound Quality & Own Voice Processing

A high level of sound quality is vital for new hearing aid wearers who have to adapt to hearing the world via an electronic device. This is especially important for the sound quality of the wearer’s own voice. Hearing care professionals often resolve own voice complaints by reducing amplification, with the unintended consequence of decreased speech intelligibility. With the new Signia Nx, this is no longer an issue—because of the revolutionary technology called Own Voice Processing (OVP).

Read more

Full Live remote Tuning

Since the introduction of TeleCare, anonymous analytics data shows that there have been more than 150,000 patient-professional interactions around the world, including 5,000 remote tuning interactions. With this large amount of data available, valuable insights can be deduced to help hearing care professionals improve their service and business success. Learn what Signia TeleCare can do for your practice and what's new with version 3.0.

Read more

How to Use Own Voice Processing in Connexx 8

Signia Nx hearing aids solve the own voice issue with a sophisticated technological solution—a real-time detection of the wearer’s voice, combined with dedicated Own Voice Processing (OVP). To use OVP, the patient must perform a short customization procedure during the initial hearing aid fitting. Here is how to do it.

Read more

Moving Beyond the Audiogram Towards a Patient-Centered, Interactive First Fit

It has long been known that pure tone audiogram (PTA) measurements cannot fully account for the variation in speech intelligibility scores measured from hearing impaired listeners. With regard to hearing aid fittings, it is clear that there is no simple solution that would allow us to perform a consistently perfect customized fitting by even adding one additional variable to audiogram data. A transition from the “average” patient fitting towards a more individual fitting requires several stages. In this paper, these stages are described and explained, based on data obtained from several clinical studies.

AudiologyOnline

Read more

Comparison Study of Speech Recognition Using Binaural Beamforming Narrow Directionality

This article examines the advantages provided by the Signia primax Narrow Directionality processing for speech understanding in background noise in four studies: Comparisons of the primax system to previous research with the binax platform, SNR benefits related to average speech understanding, and comparisons to a competitive product using Signia adaptive directional and narrow directionality processing.

The Hearing Review, May 2017

Read more

How to Use Connexx 8.3 Hearing Profile

Connexx 8.3 offers a new functionality called Hearing Profile designed to further individualize first fit for each patient. This feature uses a short sound quiz and questionnaire to quickly assess the cognitive functions and preferences of the patient. The resulting personal hearing profi le is combined with the patient’s audiometric data to propose one out of five first fit configurations when using primax fit. This precision first fit promotes better spontaneous acceptance and reduces the need for extensive fine tuning.

Read more

Listening Effort, Speech Intelligibility, and Narrow Directionality

Dr. Veronika Littmann at Signia R&D, together with Dr. Harvey Dillon and his research team at NAL recently published an article on Narrow Directionality in The Hearing Review. The article reports on a study which showed that Narrow Directionality provided a significant listening advantage in a laboratory experiment comprising a frontal target speech in diffuse speech babble. For this experiment, participants with moderate hearing loss matched the intelligibility performance of a group of age-matched near-normal hearers. The range of effort incurred in listening for the hearing-impaired participants also matched that of the age-matched, near-normal hearing group.

The Hearing Review, January 2017

Read more