Anyone who has gone to dinner in a noisy restaurant only to discover their hearing aids were amplifying the cacophony to unbearable levels without enabling them to understand their companions at all will bear witness to the fact that better comprehension of speech in noise is the Holy Grail of the hearing-aid industry. The new S Series IQ hearing-aid family from Starkey Laboratories is a big step in the right direction.
It’s been known for years that constant improvements in the speed and processing power of digital signal processors should logically enable better algorithms for comprehending speech in noise. But solutions that work well have been a long time coming. That’s because digital sound processing technology enabling hearing-aid users to better understand speech-in-noise is a game of milliseconds. It’s excruciatingly difficult to come up with algorithms fast enough to sample the speech and background noise inputs in real time and separate the wheat from the chaff: the processing system must separate the useful speech from the harmful background noise, and then actively amplify the good and suppress the bad.
Starkey says its new Voice IQ technology is fast enough to diminish background noise in the milliseconds-long gap between the syllables of spoken speech, eliminating one of the most critical source of noise that severely impairs understanding of speech in noise. The system, developed over three years at the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley California, classifies inputs every six milliseconds and adapts every 20 milliseconds — processing speeds that were nearly unimaginable just a few years ago.
Starkey claims that the better comprehension delivered by the new system enables measurable reductions in listening effort. “During clinical trials, experienced users found significant improvement in their ability to communicate with greatly reduced cognitive fatigue compared to their own hearing aids,” the company said in its announcement. The concept of cognitive fatigue due to poor speech recognition has become increasingly important in recent years as researchers have uncovered direct links between poor speech cognition and poor job performance, higher stress levels, and stress- and fatigue-related illnesses.
The S Series IQ family comes in a range of styles including behind-the-ear (BTE) and in-ear receiver in the canal (RIC) and open-fit mini BTE form factors. Integrating Starkey’s InVision directional microphone system, it is a new flagship family to lead the company’s broad line of hearing aids.
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3 responses to “Starkey's S Series iQ Hearing-Aid Family Attacks Hearing-In-Noise Problem”
So, do they work? Do they present any data to suggest they work better. Do they at least have any testimonials from users who have tried them? Without any of that, this is just a reprint of a slick press release.
John raises the age-old $60-million question – how is it possible to verify claims made by manufacturers? I believe it’s okay to report on the claims a manufacturer makes about a new product, especially when they are talking intelligently about an attempt to address one of the biggest problems all hearing-aid manufacturers face. Reporting on what they say, though, should raise exactly the questions John is raising. If any manufacturer can’t follow up with legitimate testimonials from customers, or if in fact there’s a lot of negative reaction out there in the marketplace, it’s important to report on that, too. The hearing-aid industry is more difficult than a lot of markets for technology products because it’s so hard to get objective and quantifiable performance data — hearing experience is very subjective, and very few hearing-aid users have experience with more than one or two different brands. So you have to listen to the happy customers and hope they haven’t been prompted by the manufacturer with incentives; you have to listen to the unhappy customers and hope that their complaints are legitimate and not prompted by competitors; and you have to look hard at the product and try to assess if the underlying technology is capable of doing what the manufacturer says it can. The reason I focused on the higher performance digital signal processing platforms that Starkey and its competitors are now using is that they are actually capable of doing some of the great things Starkey claims they are doing with their new product. So it is worth writing about new products from that perspective — if I saw Starkey was using a low-power processing platform that wasn’t capable of doing what they say it will do, I would either ignore the news release or do more research and prove their claims are unsupportable. Either way, I didn’t simply reprint the slick release. (If you want to read the reprint, you can see it verbatim on other hearing-loss sites). However I agree it’s always an open question whether the software and customer solution actually do live up the claims of the manufacturer and it’s worth getting as much verifiable follow up information on it as possible.
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