Advances in Hearing Aid Technology: The DigiFocus II Lara Bagby Today we are seeing a change in the typical first time hearing aid wearer. These people are younger, more active, and more willing to make use of today's digital technology without compromising cosmetics. Many will be "Baby Boomers" with industrial noise damage and challenging ski-slope losses. With good low tone hearing, these clients require the highest speech clarity for difficult listening environments and often present with occlusion and feedback issues. The latest innovation from Oticon, the DigiFocus II, has been specifically engineered to set new standards in speech clarity. This new family of digital products ranges from a CIC all the way to the compact BTE and includes a MIC with a 312 battery. Our unique 7 band, 2 channel signal processing offers highly flexible frequency response shaping, compression and expansion techniques that maximise speech intelligibility while providing fully automatic loudness compensation. A practical users' guide to fitting the new DigiFocus II will be presented which highlights the many new features that are available to the clinician in Otiset 4.0. These include an adaptation manager, automatic feedback manager, automatic detection function, audible status indicator and binaural loudness balance function. The new software is both flexible and intuitive, allowing the clinician to use their fitting time more efficiently. |