New Hearing Aid - Neuro-Compensator - New Technology?

Hearing Aids
#1

A new hearing aid has been touted as being groundbreaking. Any reactions ?

http://vitasound.com/hearing-aids/neuro-compensator/

HearAtLast (HRAL), Along With Vitasound, Announces Release of Breakthrough Patented Technology HR3000
http://at.marketwire.com/accesstracking/AccessTrackingLogServlet?PrId=853935&ProfileId=051205&sourceType=1
BURLINGTON, ON – (Marketwire) – 02/21/12 – HearAtLast Holdings Inc. (PINKSHEETS: HRAL) is pleased to announce the release of the HR3000 hearing aid, the first in a series of products available exclusively at HearAtLast clinics as well as at affiliates. The product is developed in Canada, where quality and performance are never compromised, by Vitasound Canada. It features the finest technology available today and we feel it is at the pinnacle as far as hearing aids are concerned. The featured patented technology is the Neuro-Compensator which was developed by Vitasound.
Hearing aids have come a long way since the trumpet. Current hearing aids amplify sounds and are not ideal; they don’t give the wearer back their hearing, and they just give some sound which might give the brain enough useful information to help decode incoming sounds.
A new type of hearing aid has now been developed by Vitasound. The Neuro-Compensator aid works in a different way. It has a microchip which transmits electrical signals to the brain, resulting in a more natural and complex sound signal. The Neuro-Compensator is based on the cochlear implant model, mapping the damaged areas of the ear and compensating for them alone.
In the development of the HR3000 HearAtLast has worked closely with Vitasound to have our marquis product stand above the rest. “Having our own customized products enables us to offer premium product at an attractive price. Price has always been one of the major obstacles in the purchase of a hearing aid. The new product comes with a full 2 year warranty. We are currently working on other customized features in the product line and retail appearance of our clinics that will enhance our presence in this market. We are very excited about being able to offer such a unique and distinguished product,” stated Matthew Sacco, CEO of HearAtLast Holdings Inc. For a full description of the Neuro-Compensator technology please visit our web site today at www.hearatlastholdings.com
About HearAtLast
HearAtLast Holdings, Inc. is a Nevada corporation that has developed HearAtLast, a chain of hearing stores specialising in the sale of digital hearing aids and testing services within select Walmart stores in Canada.
HearAtLast facilities sell a selection of high quality brand name hearing aids and also offer complimentary screening tests, clinical hearing tests, high end ear buds and assistive listening devices. The Company’s mission is to expand and develop opportunities within the highly fragmented hearing services to the estimated 30+ million hearing impaired individuals throughout North America by co-developing and/or licensing its HearAtLast brand throughout North America, within Walmart stores as well as in independent locations. It is also the Company’s endeavour to provide the finest Hearing Health Centres available today by offering exceptional, guaranteed products, quality service by trained professionals and all the while maintaining affordable prices. HearAtLast is accomplishing this by combining the most sought after retail space in North America with convenience and location.
For more information please visit www.hearatlastholdings.com

#2

The website looks all huff and no puff, with a faint hint of snake oil.

#3

It appears to be a legitimate company, despite the amateurish website. There’s only a handful of dealers in the USA so far. Does anyone know what the fitting range is?

MG

#4

Why this aid is automatic
It’s systematic
It’s neuromatic
Why it’s grease lightning (Grease lightning)

We’ll get some overhead receivers and some four barrel speakers
oh yeah
(Keep talking whoa keep talking)
A battery overload cutoff and chrome plated mikes oh yeah
(I’ll get the money I’ll kill to get the money)
With a four button remote they’ll be waiting at the door
You know that ain’t no shit we’ll be getting lots of tit
In Grease Lightning
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go

Purple french tail lights and thirty inch fins
oh yeah
A Palomino casing and duel muffler venting
oh yeah
With new batts, traps, and domes I can get off my rocks
You know that I ain’t bragging she’s a real pussy wagon
Grease lightning

#5

I am very interested in new technology but how is hearing aid?
I do not want to implant surgery.

#6

Sorry, but my musical interlude was waaaay better than that.

#7

Sorry, but my musical interlude was waaaay better than that.

Admit it, you were simply outclassed there!

PS You going to the Heathrow shindig?

#8

Actually reading their information it looks like they have reinvented . . . the digital hearing aid. To simplify their language a bit, they use “readings” of the cochlea to “determine the optimal gain for an individual.” Or, you know, make it louder where the hearing loss is. Then they “dynamically calculate the function of the entire spectral content of the signal” to give you a more “natural” sound.

Also known as exactly what we already do with hearing aids.

#9

The NeuroCompensator is based on a different paradigm than amplifying discrete frequency channels by db. The best way to put it in layman’s terms is this: take a working model of a healthy cochlea with a very certain auditory spectral output to the auditory nerve, subtract a damaged ear’s regions from the healthy cochlea model, and then optimize a solution as best as possible to match the healthy ear’s auditory spectral output. I suspect for this concept to work properly and preserve nonlinear crossover/harmonics, a heck of a lot more than 16 channels would be needed (and an accurate virtual cochlea).

Google “A Novel Model-Based Hearing Compensation Design Using a Gradient-Free Optimization Method” for the full research paper.

Current fitting strategies for hearing aids set the amplification in each frequency channel based on the hearing-impaired person’s audiogram, which measures pure tone thresholds for each of a small set of frequencies. However, it is well known that the detection of a sound can be strongly masked in the presence of background noise or competing speech, for example. It is therefore not surprising that many people with hearing loss end up not wearing their hearing aids. The devices are unhelpful and may even worsen the wearer’s ability to hear sounds under noisy listening conditions. Directional microphones and other generic signal processing strategies for noise reduction have resulted in modest benefits in some contexts, but not dramatic improvement. Instead, the approach we take here is to treat hearing aid design as a neural coding problem. We start with detailed models of the normal auditory nerve as well as that of a hearing-impaired person. We then search for a signal transformation that, when applied to the input to the impaired model, will result in a neural code that is close to that of the intact model. We refer to this strategy as neural compensation (Becker & Bruce, 2002). The signal transformation is highly nonlinear and dynamic and calculates the gain in each frequency channel by combining information across multiple channels rather than using a static set of channel-specific gains. The Neurocompensator should therefore be capable of approximating the contrast enhancement function of the normal ear.

Neural compensation (Becker & Bruce, 2002) was motivated by the design of adaptive hearing aid devices for hearing-impaired persons. The goal of the Neurocompensator is to restore near-normal firing patterns in the auditory nerve in spite of the hair cell damage in the inner ear. A schematic diagram of normal and impaired hearing systems, as well as the neural compensation, is illustrated in Figure 1. Ideally, the Neurocompensator attempts to compensate the hearing impairment in the auditory system and match the output of the compensated system, as closely as possible, to the output of the normal hearing system. In other words, by regarding the outputs of the normal and impaired hearing systems as the neural codes generated by the brain, we attempt to maximize the similarity of the neural codes generated from models H and ˆH in Figure 1.

MG

#10

Flannigan’s Law Of Immutable Contrasts says that anything called a Neurocompensator is 100% guaranteed to consist of a bucket of toad’s entrails.

Here is a picture of one … or sorry, its an Interociter … easy mistake to make …

#11

MG, how are you affiliated with the company?

#12

Wow, tough crowd.

I’m not affiliated with the company in any way shape or form. I’d like to think I have more marketing savvy than to name a hearing aid a “Neuro-Compensator” and have a website that doesn’t look like it’s from the mid-to-late 90’s.

The “CTO” of VitaSound posted a message on another forum. Google “VitaSound Neuro-Compensator AllDeaf.com”.

MG