#264

I suspect that this statement may be completely accurate. And I think that it is likely a sign of things to come with other companies.

Speaking only from the perspective of my insurance, which is Medicare Advantage, I am required to use only providers within network to receive my benefit. To become an in-network provider, the audiologist has to accept an agreed upon price for a pair of hearing aids. For the top of the line, full featured hearing aid, the price is $5000. The insurance company pays $1500 and I pay $3500. So, my benefit is both a discount and a subsidy.

My insurance contract runs in 3 year cycles and the negotiations occur in the year before the contract goes into effect.

The reason I think that the quoted statement is accurate regarding Oticon helping providers is that the in-network providers are locked in for 3 years once they agree to participate. In the past 3-4 years we saw rising costs during the Covid epidemic. While inflation gas eased, those costs have not come down from where they rose. So, the $5000 price is no longer covering overhead + paying for the Audi’s time. Yet, the Audi’s can’t get out of this agreement and can’t re-negotiate it.

The only way to get around this dilemma is fir companies to do what Oticon is doing, which is to refuse to sell hearing to the insurance companies or their middle men at the dopisciunted price which enables them to offer them to us at $5000.

As one of the two biggest volume companies, Oticon can afford to be the one who goes first. Others will follow.

#265

This $1500 you mentioned is normally called the “Maximum Allowed Cost” per hearing aid. I called my insurance company to find out what the maximum allowable cost is for my policy and the rep just couldn’t find any information on that. The only thing for my policy is the 50% coinsurance policy. So I’m hoping that I can get a better deal out of it by using my insurance company, but I won’t know for sure until the bill gets submitted and processed by them.

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#266

In September of last year I paid $5900 for a pair of Real 1’s with a year of support from a local independent practice. Seems like their wholesale cost wouldn’t be much different from that of a discount company selling for $5000 and underpaying a network of practitioners.

#267

Dr. Clif mentioned that intent has new 8-pin receivers. Are the new receivers more expensive than the old ones because of those 8 pins?

#268

I don’t know how much more expensive these new receivers will be, but I’m sure they’re going to be more expensive than the existing ones that have been used for the OPN/S, More and Real. Not even sure how soon they would become available on the third party market.

It’s not just about the 8 pin for better communication with the aids. I think the more impactful improvement would be the self-calibrating aspect of it. But then has out-of-calibration really been a big issue with the old receiver type to begin with?

Do any of our registered providers on this forum know if this type of receiver is also being used by any of the other hearing aid brands yet? I assume that this is not an Oticon brand-specific type of receiver, right? Hopefully just the next generation type of OEM receiver.

Is the Phonak ActiveVent receiver a Sonova only patented receiver? I was hoping that Oticon would upgrade to something like that, but apparently they didn’t.

#269

Yes, new receivers are more expensive, but not because of 8 pins, but because of integrated chip, self calibration, and new wire design. It seems Oticon placed Intent in luxury range.

#270

They’ve put the chip on there to do receiver recognition (like Starkey and others) - it might also be an attempt to prevent third party copies of the receivers getting a foothold, meaning you have to fit official spares.

I’ve not really seen if there’s a market for off-brand receivers, but I’m guessing that’s now a thing from online suppliers.

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#271

Dang, this hearing aid market is getting more and more proprietary, just like Apple iphones. It used to be that a third part could exchange components inside an Apple iPhones for repair/replacement work. Now you can’t even cannibalize parts from a broken iPhone (like the camera for example) to put it into another iPhone of the same exact model anymore.

Pretty soon the HA industry might get entwined in the Right to Repair movement fight…

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#272

Perhaps Hearing Aid manufacturers are seeing increased competition from otc hearing aids because the market for mild hearing loss is much larger than severe to profound hearing loss.

The writing is on the wall so to speak. Insurance denial hurts the consumer especially here in the states Instead of the ridiculous anti trust action against Apple, this is where they should concentrate

#273

Competition usually drives prices down, not up. My guess is that this is a response to rising costs over the past few years when there was Covid & supply chain generated rising costs.

#274

OcT has not taken off at all.

#275

I thought I’d fact check the title of this thread, which is in fact a direct quote from Oticon’s literature. It is their claim that they are the Intent is the first hearing aids with “user-intent sensors.”

This is really a false claim on the face of it because there are no sensors which can detect “user intent”. That’s something which is in the user’s mind, which no computer can know.

But I’ll cut Oticon some slack for a poor choice of words in their claim. I get their “intent”. But even there, it is a big stretch for them to claim to be first. Five months before Oticon announced the Intent Signia released its new IX platform with “Real Time Conversation Enhancement (RTCE)”… Although they use a different approach to getting the job done, the result is pretty much the same. RTCE offers a multi-stream architecture which enables them to process speech from multiple participants in a conversation simultaneously. They too use multiple cues to decide which speakers to focus on. The IX technology is based on its predecessor AX technology before it, which in turn was based on the X technology. X introduced motion sensors (accelerometers) back in 2019 and IX uses these to decide “user intent” just as Oticon dies, as one of the cues to determine which speakers to focus on. So, motion sensors are not in fact something new for Signia with their latest technology.

It’s frustrating to see manufacturers using this kind of over-the-too hype ti sell their products and n the process lead buyers to think that they don’t have choices to get the same benefit.

3 Likes
#276

I agree with you @billgem that the 4D sensors technology is kind of an over-the-top hype sensationalism. It’s not really even 4D per se in the first place. The 2 of the 4D have always been there already in just about any major hearing aid brand → the speech detection, and the environment classification. The other 2D are just the 2 motion sensors that detect the up-and-down movement (one of the remaining 2D), and the head turning motion (the other of the remaining 2D). So to call it 4D is overhype sensationalism. And of course 3D is not sexy enough. It has to be 4D to be more sexy. Who knows, in the next generation or two, maybe Oticon will come out with the “Sixth Sense” even, lol.

While the Oticon whitepaper doesn’t reveal how the interpreted intent based on these sensors play out, the Philips whitepaper does (as seen in the screenshot below). And it’s deceptively simple, almost to the point of being rudimentary. It just gets broken into 3 buckets → more SNR help for front speech if no motion (interpreted as intentful listening), default SNR help if occasional motion, and a 360 degrees omni SNR experience with speech if steady motion (like walking). So the interpretations based on the motion, as you can see, is very rudimentary, and the guessed intent can easily be wrong from the user’s real intent. There’s really no magical silver bullet here about knowing the intent of the user, it’s really just a very rough guess which can easily be wrong half of the times.

I think the real advancement of the Intent is the improvement done with their DNN 2.0. By training the DNN 2.0 with more versatile sound scene samples, they’re able to eke out yet another 2 more dB of noise attenuation from the 10 dB that they were able to get out of the Real already. For every 1 dB of SNR improvement, it translates roughly to another 10% of speech clarity. So a 20% of more speech clarity, on top of the already amazing 10 dB of SNR contrast for speech in the Real, is no chump change here.

But of course DNN 2.0 does not sound as sexy as 4D sensor and being able to “read” user intent, and you wouldn’t be able to attach a new catchy name like “Intent” to the new line up, so off we go with the focus on the 4D sensor, while the real hero in my opinion is the more boring DNN 2.0 improvement.

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#277

No motion - more help for speech from front - it’s very strange solution. If I sit in airport hall - Intent will focus more to frontal speech? if I could, I would swap the positions of the enhanced focus and standard focus in the table.

#278

Yes, @Volusiano, advanced DNN is the real benefit of the Intent, which should result in improved SNR and better hearing in noisy environments.

#279

Haha, yes, exactly. If you’re at an airport and you want to hear speech announcements regarding flight information and the likes, you shouldn’t be sitting still on a chair, but instead you’d have to keep walking around to provide steady motion to the hearing aids to give you the 360 degree help experience. Very silly…

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#280

I think you don’t unterstand the way Oticon is working. They work with open sound, that means you can always hear 360°, it will not decrease the noise in the background like other hearing aids, so you will probably hear the announcements, and then you start focus on it to hear it more clearly.

I have tested Oticon Intent and Starkey Genesis in a greek restaurant and I have to say that the Genesis has lowered the noise much more than then Intent and for that they are more relaxing but this means also that with Genesis you could probably miss the announcements.

#281

@Misterref78 → yes, you are right that with the Oticon open paradigm, you’ll be able to hear the announcement OK, albeit not as loud as whatever speech is going on in front if your head is still. Then if you catch it, you probably will jerk your head up and maybe turn your head around a little bit to “find” the announcement, and in that process opens up the sound field to 360 degrees to allow you to hear the announcement more clearly.

But there is a chance that you might miss it if you don’t catch it because you’re distracted with something else at the time and continue to keep your head perfectly motionless.

But we were just being overly sarcastic to downplay the helpfulness of the 4D sensor here. I’m not ignoring the fact that the open paradigm of the Oticon aids can greatly hell remove the “blinder” effect and make us more aware of other sounds in the environment.

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#282

Good friends, firstly I am severely and almost profoundly deaf… I already have the new Oticon Intent 1 hearing aids, the most recent top of the range, that is, the most expensive of all and which are still in the experimental phase… I have two positive points which are: answering calls (iphone X) The negative aspect is when I am in a place where there is a lot of noise, for example in a bar or restaurant, I have a lot of difficulty hearing the person next to me because of the ambient noise… I have already tried to go to my audiologist several times to adjust and it seems to me that the audiologist doesn’t know what he’s doing… and that leaves me frustrated. Does anyone else have this experience? Ah, sorry for my poor English, at least I tried to explain my situation as best as possible.

2 Likes
#283

Oh, by any chance is there free downloadable software so I can try it out and adjust it ( Oticon Intent 1 )? Please help me