Hearing health is brain health
Even mild hearing loss can have serious consequences for people’s brains and lives. Hearing loss increases the effort of listening. Making sense of what is heard becomes harder, increasing listening stress and increasing their mental load. This leads to fatigue and a tendency to give up when listening becomes challenging.
These challenges may drive people to avoid social gatherings and miss out on the moments that matter, because they are unable to participate. This ultimately increases the risk of loneliness, social isolation, and depression.
The brain needs access to the full sound scene
Scientific research makes it clear that our brains need access to the full sound scene – not just speech – to work in a natural way. We need to give the brain more information from its surroundings.
No matter the type of hearing loss, hearing aids must help the ears deliver a good neural code to the brain that is easy to interpret. This neural code must ensure that all relevant sounds are accessible, clear, comfortable, and audible in any situation.
This is necessary to create the full perspective of sounds and maintain a strong focus on sounds of interest.
Conventional technology suppresses the sounds of life
With its directionality, gain reduction, speech prioritisation and traditional compression, conventional hearing aid technology restricts people’s access to the full sound scene. When sounds are suppressed by the hearing aid, the ear sends a poor neural code to the brain.
BrainHearing™ technology provides the full sound scene
Our goal is to provide the most natural hearing experience. We use the philosophy of BrainHearing to develop technology that provides the brain with access to the full sound environment – because the more sound information the brain has to work with, the better it can perform.
At the heart of Oticon BrainHearing™ technology are the three industry-leading MoreSound Technologies: MoreSound Amplifier™, MoreSound Intelligence™, and MoreSound Optimizer™.
Proven to bring life-changing benefits
Oticon’s hearing aids don’t just improve hearing abilities. They also benefit the brain and support better wellbeing of people with hearing loss.
We know this because we go above and beyond the competition in the way we conduct research to prove the life-changing benefits associated with using our technology, such as reducing listening effort, increasing memory recall, and reducing listening stress.
To prove the incredible benefits of our technology, we put it to the test in dynamic scenarios that recreate real-life listening environments, using innovative research methods such as EEG testing, pupillometry, VR technology, and pulse monitoring.
Discovering tomorrow’s hearing solutions
Oticon is the only hearing aid company with its own independent research facility dedicated to audiology – Eriksholm Research Centre – which explores scientific areas with the potential to improve the lives of people with hearing loss.
Discoveries from Eriksholm continually inspire us to develop life-changing BrainHearing™ technology. Learn more about the benefits of our collaboration in a video on Eriksholm’s webpage.