Part 2 of 2
Part 2 of our series presents evidence that supports the principles championed by Oticon Medical – BrainHearingTM and Direct Sound Transmission. Read below to learn more about these important principles and how they affect patient outcomes based on 10 years of clinical evidence.
Proven Hearing Excellence
As an audiologist, wouldn’t it make your job easier if the simple act of providing a patient with access to sound through hearing technology always equaled excellent outcomes? However, it is not that simple. The right choice of a hearing system will impact every aspect of a recipient’s life – from a conversation with their friend to learning a new subject in school to enjoying a movie at the local theater. At Oticon Medical, our goal is to help our recipients invest their cognitive resources in understanding, remembering, interacting and enjoying, rather than just hearing. We cannot make all situations noiseless and easy, but our solutions should reward the user with increased performance when more effort is necessary to understand an important situation. Through BrainHearing and Direct Sound Transmission, Oticon Medical offers a unique solution for your patients with clinical evidence to support its advantages .
BrainHearing is the Foundation of Better Hearing
BrainHearingTM is the foundation on which we developed the Ponto™ 3 SuperPower (SP) and the Ponto 4 hearing systems. It is about the basic understanding of how hearing works and how the brain makes sense of sound with less effort. Building on our foundation of BrainHearing, we also offer the advantages of Direct Sound Transmission. Direct Sound Transmission delivers the most efficient transmission of speech and sound via the skull bone directly to the cochlea without skin dampening, providing access to a larger range of everyday sounds with less distortion.
The combination of these two principles [BrainHearing and Direct Sound Transmission] demonstrates a significant decrease in listening effort can be achieved with the Ponto 3 SP, as indicated by reduced pupil dilation (Bianchi, F, et al. 2019). This pupillometry study proves that Ponto 3 SP, with its higher MFO level can significantly reduce the effort needed to listen to speech in noise.
An Open and Balanced Sound Experience with OpenSound Navigator
Ponto 4 features the groundbreaking OpenSound Navigator™, offering speed and precision for constant access to 360° sound. The result is a truly open and balanced sound experience in complex listening situations, bringing significant improvement in speech understanding. In fact, clinical evidence indicates a 30% improvement in speech understanding in noise (Bianchi, F, Weile, J N, et al. 2020). Also noted in this same study was that 80% of recipients preferred wearing the Ponto 4 when in a complex listening environment.
These studies show how improved sound quality does not only mean the ability to hear better, but for the first time, learning, memory, and listening effort were evaluated in bone anchored recipients to assess benefits beyond better hearing. The novel research presented here strengthens the evidence that the choice of the system and sound processor may have implications on everyday life activities for your patients. This is why the advanced technology offered by Oticon Medical makes all the difference!
To summarize, ten years after the first recipient received their Ponto sound processor, we have worked strategically to gain insights from surgeons, recipients and clinicians in the field to develop products that improve patient care and outcomes with the Ponto device. Without this research, bone anchored recipients would not be able to benefit from a minimal, suture-free surgical procedure, simple and easy aftercare, improved quality of life and the significant hearing improvements that characterize the Ponto System. To learn more about the studies outlined in this blog please visit our website [insert address].
References:
Bianchi, F, et al. (2019). Benefit of higher maximum force output on listening effort in bone-anchored hearing system users: A pupillometry study. Ear Hear 40:1220-1232. Bianchi, F, Weile, J N, et al. (2020). OpenSound Navigator™ for Ponto, Oticon Medical white paper 215170.
About the Author:
Carissa Moeggenberg is an audiologist who has worked in the hearing healthcare field for the past 28 years. She is presently the training manager for Oticon Medical.