New Australian software to bring out the best in hearing aids worldwide
New Australian software to bring out the best in hearing aids worldwide
An Australian software program is fast becoming the new international standard for prescribing hearing aids – the professional task of adjusting hearing aids to make sure they are the best fit for each user.
Developed by the HEARing CRC and its Core Partner the National Acoustics Laboratories (the research division of Australian Hearing), the NAL-NL2 program is set to become the preferred way to fit hearing aids so that wearers have higher-quality hearing.
According to a 2005 World Health Organisation study, about 28 million people worldwide wear hearing aids. For them to be effective, they need to be adjusted to match an individual’s unique hearing loss so they are comfortable to wear, and provide the greatest benefits to communication in different sound environments and situations.
Fitting a hearing aid to an individual’s hearing-loss pattern has traditionally involved manually adjusting small knobs and switches to reduce or enhance particular frequencies and sound levels. With the arrival of computers, adjustment is conducted through a computer interface, and the range of performance characteristics achievable with any single hearing aid has increased markedly, making the task of adjustment more complex.
The international release of NAL NL2’s predecessor, NAL-NL1, in 1999 made it easy for audiologists to apply a complex procedure that prescribed how the hearing aid should be adjusted so that the hearing aid was most likely to provide optimal performance for each individual.
Adjunct Prof. Harvey Dillon (NAL Director), who played an instrumental role in the development of the NAL NL1 and NAL-NL2 prescription methods, said the success of NAL-NL1 lies in its ability to provide good speech intelligibility while still providing hearing aid wearers with the overall loudness they prefer in different situations.
“NAL-NL2 is based on the same philosophy, but incorporates more extensive data on how much information hearing-impaired people can extract from speech at different levels and in different frequency ranges. It uses more sophisticated methods of predicting speech intelligibility and loudness for people with different degrees and configurations of hearing loss. The final formula, which brings all the data together, is also more sophisticated and is based on neural network mathematics,” Adjunct Prof. Dillon said.
NAL-NL2 has been licensed to all of the major international hearing aid and audiological test equipment manufacturers, continuing the successful delivery of HEARing CRC technologies internationally and making Australia the world leader in hearing-aid prescription software.
The Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) program is an Australian Government Initiative.
A photo to go with this media release can be downloaded from here: http://hotfile.com/dl/139952357/88ac6ac/NALNL2.jpg.html
Photo caption: An Australian software program is set to bring out the best in hearing aids worldwide.
