Oticon Neural Noise Suppression

[Volusiano]

@SpudGunner

Here’s what’s said in one of Oticon’s Genie2 seminars:

"Genie 2 Fitting Focus Series: Customizing MoreSound
Intelligence Settings
Recorded February 19, 2021
Presenter: Amanda Szarythe, AuD

However, it does give you the option to increase noise reduction for difficult environments when a patient is in difficult listening environments often and reporting they wish you could take away a little more of the background noise. Here, it is very important if a patient is struggling in noise to determine if the background noise is overwhelming for them or if they are having trouble hearing voices. An example of when you may increase the noise reduction is a patient that regularly goes to the same restaurant every Friday night and is reporting the background noise is overwhelming.".

My interpretation of what they’re saying is this → (I’m going to try to rephrase it in my own way):

If a patient complains to you about being in a noisy place, you gotta ask them for clarification:

1. Is the noise just too much for you but you’re still hearing voices OK, except that you don’t like the extra noise?
2. Or is the noise way too much that it’s actually starting to overwhelm and actually impacting your ability to hear and understand the voices as well?

If the patient says the answer is 1 → don’t increase the max Neural Noise Suppression because they can still understand voices OK, so now if you give them crappy/muddied/distorted ambient sounds, they’re still not going to be happy anyway. Just make them live with it and tell them if they can hear voices OK still, then leave it alone and eventually their brain hearing will adapt and learn to live with the noise and tune it out.

But if the patient says the answer is 2 → then you better do something about it and max out this max Neural Noise Suppression value so the patient can understand the voices in these places. That’s the ultimate priority and they’ll be happy enough to understand the voices that they don’t mind if the ambient sounds are muddier. And if they complain, remind them that they should be happy to be able to hear the voices with your new adjustment, and stop complaining about muddied ambient sounds because the world is not perfect!!!

Now back to my own (Volusiano’s) commentary: if the patient doesn’t know better to complain to the HCP right away, or if the patient doesn’t or hasn’t encounter such a very complex environment to even realize that it may be an issue, the max value is kept at a “lesser” (I prefer to call it handicapped) value by the HCP at Oticon’s recommendation. Then the few times the patient gets into that very complex environment situation, their More 1 is handicapped by a lesser value and cannot perform as well as it should be able to on voices, all just for the sake of Oticon not wanting to get a black eye on having muddied ambient sounds at the expense of the patient not even knowing that they actually have a choice to choose to understand voices better or to hear ambient sounds better in the worst case sound scenario.