Question
What are the key features of the Inium Sense platform and what benefits do they deliver for patients?
Answer
Inium Sense is the new Oticon platform that we built from the ground up. Using modern design techniques, we’ve increased the capacity of the firmware section of the platform by 30 percent. Most of the 30 percent increase in processing resources is dedicated to our newly enhanced feedback cancellation system, the Inium Sense Feedback Shield. Using this new system, we can identify the occurrence of feedback sooner before it occurs and react up to four times faster. This gives the patient more protection against transient feedback, and then returns the hearing aid to a stable state that is feedback free with excellent sound quality.
The feedback system has new Voice Aligned Compression, or VAC+. The “+” refers to a new feature, Soft Speech Booster. Soft Speech Booster increases access to soft, high-frequency sounds by at least 3 dB, for approximately 85 percent of the patients. By increasing access to soft, high-frequency speech sounds by this amount, we're seeing word recognition improvements in some patients as great as 20%. The average improvements across the group are in the range of 7 – 9%. Consistent with our belief in the need for Personalization, when the patients had the opportunity to try alternative settings on this dimension, the average improvement grew to 13%. We estimate that Soft Speech Booster will enhance the understanding of speech in approximately 75% of all conversations experienced by hearing-aid users.
We launched Tinnitus SoundSupport™ because there continues to be a large group of individuals who suffer from tinnitus. We have cutting-edge solutions for people with sensorineural hearing loss, but we haven't reached into the area of tinnitus until now. We’re excited to extend the outstanding technologies that Oticon is known for to patients who also need sound generation capabilities within products.
This Ask the Expert was taken from an interview with Oticon's Dr. Don Schum on the Inium Sense platform - read the full interview here. Learn more about Oticon on the Oticon Expo Page on AudiologyOnline.
