Hearing Technologies

At this year’s CES convention in Las Vegas, Qualcomm Technologies announced a new low-power chip that the company says could drastically reduce power consumption for high tech wireless earbuds and hearables, allowing for much longer battery life. The new chip, QCC5100, is engineered to reduce power consumption by as much as 65 percent for voice calls and streaming. The chip’s

At the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Samsung will unveil a new speaker technology that can reportedly send sound to a single person without the need for earphones. Called S-Ray (Sound-Ray), the new portable directional speakers are said to “maintain the advantages of conventional directional speakers and/or earphones”. The new S-Ray technology is one of three new projects spun out

Cochlear implant maker, Advanced Bionics, announced last week that the company will be incorporating Sonova’s new SWORD (Sonova Wireless One Radio Digital) chip technology into their devices. Current users of the Naída CI Q90 processor, as well as future recipients, will be able to use their device to connect to any Bluetooth-enabled cell phone. The new wireless technology platform allows

Swiss startup, Fennex AG, announced the release of Fennex 2.0–an updated version of their popular Augmented Hearing App. Fennex 2.0 includes new features, such as a simplified user interface and a feature that enables or disables the “hearing correct” function based on results of the hearing test. Overall the company says the update offers “greater personalization of the hearing experience”.

According to the results of a study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), neurofeedback training, using functional MRI (fMRI), has the potential to reduce the severity or even eliminate tinnitus. Real-time fMRI neurofeedback is a technique that allows individuals to learn voluntary control over localized brain activity. Over the past several years, studies

By Stephen O. Frazier, Hearing Loss Support Specialist I have enormous respect and gratitude for the many fine, conscientious, caring hearing care professionals I’ve met over the years but there are some who, it appears to me, are either not up to date on an old but still invaluable technology – telecoils – or for some other unfathomable reason do

Boston-based biotech firm, Decibel Therapeutics, announced a collaboration with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals to boost research efforts to “discover and develop new potential therapeutics to protect, repair, and restore hearing”. As part of the effort, Regeneron will get an equity stake in Decibel and receive royalty payments if the company’s treatments get approved.   Decibel Theraputics, which was founded in 2015 with

by Stéphane Davoine, editor in chief of Audiology Infos Brazil   Vice-president of global medical affairs at GN ReSound and a former president of the American Academy of Audiology, David Fabry gave several lectures at the XIV Encontro International sobre próteses auditivas, last June in São Paulo, Brazil. He also answered The questions of Audiology Infos Brazil about some hot

While there continues to be a growing number of companies developing drugs to treat inner ear disorders, the inner ear remains a particularly challenging organ for targeted drug delivery. Now, however, a novel device to deliver drugs to the inner ear will undergo preclinical testing in an industry consortium. With funding from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication

Sivantos has announced the release of its Signia Nx hearing aid instrument family, which incorporates the company’s new Own Voice Processing (OVPTM) system. According to the company, the new Signia Nx technology uses a high speed classifier system that “ensures soundscape and own voice processing work in parallel to replicate natural sound perception”. Powered by Signia’s Ultra HD e2e binaural