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Dr. Tessitore Reveals New Oticon Real Hearing Aid

Hi! My name is Dr. Bethaney Tessitore and I work at Now Hear This Clinic in Raleigh, North Carolina. Here at Now Hear This we work with all of the major hearing aid companies in the industry. Recently, one of the companies launched a new product and I went to that training to find out what was new about it. The hearing aid company was Oticon. It’s a company that has been in business for over 120 years and they have really good products. Previously we were fitting what was called the Oticon More. Now we will be fitting the Oticon Real. It’s an upgrade from the More. It has many of the same features that gave good listening quality, but there are some added benefits to it. Now it is going to look the same- this is what one would look like. They come in different colors. But, some of the feature sets that the Real has on it that the More did not, we’re going to discuss today. 

First of all, there’s something to help with wind noise. So, I have a lot of patients that are golfers, maybe they walk or run, and wind noise can be a real problem for them. So, Oticon came out with a way to help decrease the wind noise. They also helped decrease what’s called handling noise. Handling noise is anything that touches the microphone. So, if you rub your hand on the back of your hearing aid, that’s handling noise. In realistic everyday situations, handling noise is going to be caused by hair. That’s one of the most common issues. So, when I rub my hair I can hear that noise, but it’s worse when the hair is going over the microphone. So, Oticon also came out with something to help with handling noise, so hair and other noises like that won’t be as much of an issue. And basically, what they do for the wind noise and the handling noise- there are 2 microphones on the hearing aid- and there are a lot of reasons for having two microphones. One thing that it does is the microphones can pick up whether or not the noise coming into the hearing aid is environmental noise or whether it’s noise caused by wind, or hair, or other types of handling noise. If it is, and it’s only coming into one microphone, it can temporarily decrease the input to that microphone and it will reduce that noise. And it works pretty well! I’m excited to have patients try this and see what they think. 

Another thing that Oticon has done with the Real hearing aid is it helps with sudden impact noises- transient noises that are quick and loud. Transient noises that are quick and loud. An example would be a door slamming; a car door slamming, a house door slamming, maybe taking your keys and throwing them on the table. Those are sudden impact noises and if the hearing aid decreases all sound when that happens so it’s not too loud if somebody’s trying to have a conversation with you, it’s also going to impact that conversation, and we don’t want that to happen. So, Oticon has a way to decrease those transient noises so you can still have a conversation without decreasing speech while those noises are occurring. They’ve done a lot of research and what they’ve found is that using this new method, it decreases listening effort by 22% and that’s a lot! Because people with hearing loss and hearing aid users get very fatigued at the end of the day. So, if we can decrease that listening effort over the course of a day, it’s really going to help our patients out. 

So, we are now in the process of dispensing these hearing aids, and I’m excited to hear some feedback from my patients as to what they think of the new Oticon Real. If you have any questions, feel free to call us at Now Hear This and we would be happy to answer any questions you had, we would be happy to scheduled an appointment so I can show you what they look like and tell you more information about them. I hope you have a great day!