HEARING AID RATINGS: 94% PREFER WIDEX EVOKE™ IN NOISE OVER OTHER NON-WIDEX HEARING AIDS

If you’ve been following our blogs or SoMe posts, you’ll know that we’ve been conducting a hearing aid satisfaction study in nine countries over the past six months.The study examines how satisfied users are with their own hearing aids compared with WIDEX EVOKE in a range of real-life listening situations over seven weeks.

Now the results are in: Users are more satisfied with WIDEX EVOKE

After seven weeks spent switching four times between WIDEX EVOKE and their own hearing aids, users were more satisfied with WIDEX EVOKE across different real-life situations (figure 1). What’s more, the users who were already wearing another Widex hearing aid model were more satisfied overall with their own hearing aids and with WIDEX EVOKE than other users.

But not only are users more satisfied with WIDEX EVOKE overall.

Users also prefer WIDEX EVOKE for soft sounds

Being able to hear soft sounds comes in handy in many situations, like when you’re trying to understand a soft-spoken conversation partner. That’s partly thanks to the Variable Speed Compressor, which maintains audibility for soft sounds following loud sounds.

Meanwhile, the Soft Level Noise Reduction system removes constant low-level noises that you don’t want to hear, such as room ventilation and PC fans. 

These features are likely to contribute to enhanced audibility for soft speech – and overall higher satisfaction with the ability to hear soft sounds.

As for noisy situations, users prefer WIDEX EVOKE too

Noisy situations are particularly challenging for hearing aid users. And even for those who wear a hearing aid, hearing loss sometimes leads people to avoid everyday noisy situations – which in turn can be both harmful to both health and quality of life.  

In recent survey data from Hearing Tracker, 72% of respondents rate hearing in noisy settings as being most important, with another 16% in the second-highest category of importance. In our study, users evaluated six everyday noisy situations, like talking in noise or in large groups.

Overall, 88% were more satisfied with WIDEX EVOKE across noisy situations

And when it comes to users whose own hearing aids were not Widex models, a whopping 94% were more satisfied with WIDEX EVOKE than with their own non-Widex hearing aids.

Why do users prefer WIDEX EVOKE?

We believe it’s thanks to its unique combination of automation and personalization.

Fluid Sound Technology is the automatic system that identifies every sound situation the listener is in and then adjusts to it using a number of features. You can read more about that in the preliminary study results.

The personalized part of WIDEX EVOKE lies in SoundSense Learn

SoundSense Learn is a fine-tuning interface driven by machine learning that allows users to create and save their preferred settings for any given listening situation. But even the best automatic hearing aid can’t predict what the user wants to hear in all situations. It’s in these situations that SoundSense Learn is a great tool.

In our survey, 72% of those who had used SoundSense Learn said it had helped them improve a listening situation – and 80% would recommend the feature to others.

How do users use SoundSense Learn?

SoundSense Learn lets us collect anonymized data across WIDEX EVOKE users. Around one in five of those who have access to SoundSense Learn has actually used it. This isn’t surprising, since WIDEX EVOKE comes with many automatic features.

We’ve looked at an anonymized sample of around 13,000 unique users, who have created over 33,000 individual programs. Around half of the users have one saved program, while the other half have multiple saved programs for use across different situations.

Most of the programs are used more than once, and more than half the programs get used at least five times. But there are also users who use SoundSense Learn to adjust sound in the moment without saving the settings.

Every dot in figure 5 represents a unique user-created program. And the fact that there’s no apparent clustering suggests that these are adjustments that couldn’t be fixed by changing the fitting rationale. They are truly unique to that person, and that person’s settings are impossible to predict.

But SoundSense Learn can’t fit hearing aids

Initial fitting and more general fine-tuning are still specialized tasks for the hearing care professional. What SoundSense Learn can do is help the user overcome problems in specific real-life situations that could have challenged a hearing care professional anyway – because it’s so hard for users to recall and explain the difficult listening situations they’ve had. So it’s likely that SoundSense Learn increases user satisfaction and frees up resources for other tasks, including the kind of counselling that can increase end-user satisfaction even more.

Link to article in Hearing Review >


Now, would you like to try out WIDEX EVOKE in your practice?