Oticon Powers Up Sumo DM Hearing Aids For Hardest-Of-Hearing Customers

Designing hearing aids for people with severe-to-profound hearing loss is one of the biggest challenges confronting hearing-aid manufacturers.

Packing all that power into a small digital device not only exacerbates many of the problems found in hearing aids for moderate hearing loss, but also creates a few vexing problems unique to the high-power end of the market. Because so much amplification is required for the user to hear speech, identifying and squelching background noise is an especially difficult problem to solve. Then, without near-perfect matching of amplified frequencies to the user’s audiogram, too much amplification at the wrong frequencies can quickly overwhelm the user’s sensitive ears. And feedback, the noisy whistling that occurs when a microphone and hearing aid re-amplify sound made by a nearby speaker, is a huge problem because the more powerful the speaker, the more feedback you get. Unfortunately, because severely impaired consumers make up a small segment of the hearing assistance market, though one with the most acute need, the industry has tended to spend less time developing technologies that can be helpful in mitigating the problems that come with high-powered hearing aids.

That’s why Oticon’s latest high-end hearing aid is so refreshing: the new Sumo DM, designed specifically for severely impaired users, takes on the technology problems at the high end of the market with gusto. I even like the name Oticon gave to the new product and its associations with super-strong Japanese Sumo wrestlers.

“Because they represent a smaller percentage of hearing impaired people, the needs of individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss are sometimes overlooked when developing new technologies,” Gordon Wilson, Vice President of Marketing at Oticon, Inc., said in a press release. “At Oticon, we have a long-standing history of producing high quality, state-of-the-art power hearing instruments for this special group of users. We understand their unique needs.” Oticon bills the Sumo DM as “the smallest digital Super Power instrument in the world,” packing all its power into a form factor not much larger than the new, slimmed-down behind-the-ear (BTE) designs for that are becoming standard for mainstream users. That’s impressive because the electronics required to deliver multiple features along with the very high amplification are substantial.

“The Sumo DM incorporates the most advanced features you will see in a Super Power hearing aid,” said Oticon Product Manager Maureen Doty, who gave a presentation at the annual SHHH (Self-Help for Hard of Hearing People) convention earlier this month. The Sumo DM features Oticon’s “TriState Noise Management” technology, which senses shifts from quiet to noisier to noisiest environments and automatically changes programs, saving the user the trouble of manually changing the hearing aid’s volume and program settings. The system also uses Oticon’s “VoiceFinder” technology to make speech more intelligible in noise. And it integrates eight audio channels, enabling more sophisticated mapping of amplification to the unique pattern of hearing loss at different frequencies in the user’s personal audiogram than is possible with many other high-end devices currently on the market. The system also includes Oticon’s new Dynamic Feedback Cancellation technology, a sophisticated solution which detects feedback and generates sound waves that automatically counter and cancel the noise.

Power is as power does. It’s nice to see a major manufacturer taking the lead in driving the best new technologies into the hardest-of-hearing market niche. And let me make a final comment on the name: at the SHHH convention, one of the listeners in the audience complained that naming the new digital product Sumo DM was a “terrible marketing decision” because Oticon’s venerable line of analog high-performance products also carries the Sumo name. I beg to differ. Whether it be analog or digital, power is power, and in my book, Sumo is as Sumo does.