trueLOUDNESS
The new quality in hearing aid fitting
Every hearing care professional knows the balancing act between loudness and speech understanding. Often the initial acceptance of the pre-calculations is not given and requires costly corrections by the hearing care professional during the first appointment. Once the loudness has been successfully controlled, clients often remain dissatisfied with the speech understanding. A complex fine-tuning process is necessary in order to adjust the level- and frequency-dependent amplification values individually.
Why is that?
Despite similar audiograms, the loudness perception of binaural broadband signals, such as speech, music and everyday sounds, is very different. 25% of all people with hearing impairment exhibit hypersensitivity here, but this often goes undetected in practice because existing methods for measuring hearing use narrowband signals that do not adequately reflect the client's reality. Audiogram-based fittings such as DSL, NAL and the manufacturer-based fitting formulas differ by up to 15 dB in gain prediction and thus do not provide reliable individual target curves.
The solution:
trueLOUDNESS is a loudness-based method for fitting hearing instruments. It normalises the loudness perception for binaural broadband signals and thus ensures sufficient amplification for soft speech with high initial acceptance in noisy environments. In just a few minutes, trueLOUDNESS provides the missing information on loudness perception and reliably determines the individually required amplification for the hearing system setting. TrueLOUDNESS brings certainty to dynamic fitting and helps in the selection of a suitable hearing system.
Features
- First fitting method for normalisation of binaural broadband loudness perception
- The world's first fitting method that takes into account individual binaural broadband loudness summation.
- Scientifically proven. Evaluated in many studies.
- High speech intelligibility even in quiet speech
- High initial acceptance even in noisy environments
- Less fine-tuning required
- Individually fitting compression settings
- Up to 20 dB difference in gain prediction with similar audiograms
- Quickly detect peculiarities in coverage (high compression ratios, negative gain values)
- Measurement using the A2000 free-field headphones
- Short measurement time approx. 10 min
- Automated loudness scaling with automatic level selection
Exclusiv for ACAM5 users
Acousticon offers this innovation, developed by Hörzentrum Oldenburg, exclusively for the ACAM 5 for the first time worldwide. Expand your fitting process with trueLOUDNESS and achieve an optimal fitting result for your customers in a short time. Achieve a new quality in the individual fitting of hearing systems.
Your path to a new quality of hearing aid fitting:
You can purchase trueLOUDNESS from our sales partner Acousticon.
Acousticon Hörsysteme GmbH
Mail: info@acousticon.de
Phone: +49 6162 / 9324 – 0 (Zentrale)
Use cases
Since October, we have been supporting 20 hearing care businesses in fitting hearing aids with trueLOUDNESS. Among the participants is Sven Winkler, Managing Director of Brillen Müller (Wittlich), who has converted the hearing aid fitting in his branches to trueLOUDNESS. Again and again, cases come up where one can learn a lot about individual hearing aid fitting.
We discuss these cases and record them for you as video recordings. This way, everyone can benefit from the insights.
trueLOUDNESS Discussion Round
References
- Oetting et al. (2016) Spectral and binaural loudness summation in hearing-impaired listeners, Hearing Research 335, 179-192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2016.03.010
- Oetting & Ewert (2017) Loudness summation of equal loud narrowband signals in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners, Int J Audol., 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1080/14992027.2017.1380848
- van Beurden et al. (2018). Potential Consequences of Spectral and Binaural Loudness Summation for Bilateral Hearing Aid Fitting. Trends in hearing, 22, https://doi.org/10.1177/2331216518805690
- van Beurden et al. (2021) Uni- and bilateral spectral loudness summation and binaural loudness summation with loudness matching and categorical loudness scalin, Int J Audol., 60, 350-358. https://doi.org/10.1080/14992027.2020.1832263
Suck, L.-C., Hartog, L., Ewert, S. D., Hohemann, V., & Oetting, D. (20202020). Verkürzung der trueLOUDNESS-Anpassmethode zur binauralen breitbandigen Lautheitsnormalisierung in Hörgeräten. 23. Jahrestagung Der Deutschen Gesellschaft Für Audiologie. Köln. https://doi.org/10.3205/20dga040
Oetting, D. (2021). Die binaurale breitbandige Lautheitssummation. Hörakustik, 09/2021.
- Oetting et al. (2018) Restoring perceived loudness for listeners with hearing loss. Ear and hearing, 39(4), 664-678. https://doi.org/10.1097/aud.0000000000000521
- Oetting et al (2019) Subjective loudness ratings of vehicles noise with the hearing aid fitting methods NAL-NL2 and trueLOUDNESS, (ISAAR) https://proceedings.isaar.eu/index.php/isaarproc/article/view/2019-33
trueLOUDNESS - the software at a glance
