Signia unveils revolutionary hearing aid platform Augmented Xperience

Our new platform Augmented Xperience changes the way your clients hear the world. Instead of them having to strain to discern speech from background noise, our new platform uses proprietary Augmented Focus™ technology to process the two separately and create a clear contrast for the first time ever. It then recombines them to deliver outstanding speech clarity in a fully immersive soundscape. This makes it easy for your clients to follow conversations even in difficult listening situations and reduces their brain’s listening effort, giving them more energy throughout their day.

Augmented Xperience also handles the streaming signal input independently from the rest of the hearing aid with the aim of streaming via Bluetooth sounding even clearer than before. In all these innovative ways, Augmented Xperience goes beyond previous standards in natural sound and opens up a new world of augmented hearing.

Immerse yourself in outstanding speech clarity

Our revolutionary platform allows your clients to immerse themselves in outstanding speech clarity while being fully aware of the soundscape around them, turning their hearing reality into an Augmented Xperience. It achieves this by using a completely new way of processing sound signals: Augmented Focus™.

Augmented reality typically adds a new visual element to make reality seem larger or fuller. Our Augmented Focus™ technology captures reality in two different layers through its dedicated processors and then optimizes the balance in the listener’s favor. If they are holding a conversation, the focus processor is prioritized, pulling speech closer to the listener so it sounds as clear as possible, while the other processor keeps surrounding sounds a little further away for a clear and stable natural environment, giving speech the space needed to stand out.

 

 

 

As a result, sounds that the hearing aid wearer is focused on appear slightly closer than in reality and crisp and clear with full dynamics while background noises are attenuated. This innovative effect is comparable to a 3D movie.

Augmented Focus keeps speech signals crisp and clear with full dynamics while shaping background noises more softly with high spatial resolution and just the right level of amplification, so they don’t conflict with what your clients are focusing on.

A radically new way of processing sound

Conventional hearing aids’ processing often sacrifices important parameters like sound quality and spatial resolution for the sake of speech intelligibility. Augmented Focus ensures nothing important is sacrificed. It classifies all incoming signals into two distinct categories. The focus area covers all relevant signals that your clients want to be able to focus on easily. The ambient sound covers signals that are important for them to comprehend their environment but should not be distracting.

Augmented Focus then deploys two dedicated processors:

• The focus processor extracts speech, optimizes it for clarity and brings it even closer to your clients than in real life.
• The ambient sound processor ensures the surroundings are attenuated and intact so that your clients feel the world around them but are not overwhelmed by it.

In addition, Own Voice Processing (OVP) ensures a natural perception of the hearing aid wearer’s own voice when they are speaking to avoid any possible acoustic irritation.

 

 

Via the binaural audio link, the right and left hearing aids can use each other’s microphones and the combined processing power of their chips to deliver a revolutionary augmented hearing experience.

Experience our wide range of additional audiological innovations

Our new chip contains double the audiological core processors and 30% more electric circuits than its predecessor. Its binaural synchronization is 36% faster while its power consumption is 22% lower.

 

 

These factors combine to deliver a wide range of additional innovative technologies that make up this unprecedent Augmented Xperience:

 

e2e wireless 4.0 – A great leap for true binaural hearing

Our new ear-to-ear (e2e) system e2e 4.0 syncs more binaural audio data than ever, ensuring clearer speech processing and high-precision directional awareness. It also significantly boosts the speed of data transmission, delivering a much smoother sound experience and inaudible shifts between different settings. Latency is reduced by 60% so that transitions between different modes are no longer audible.

 

TruEar 360

The powerful processing engine allows for an exceptional TruEar 360 mic mode that better reproduces and emphasizes the capabilities of the natural pinna-effect better than ever. TruEar 360 highlights the difference between front and back sources of sound to make localization of sound sources easier.

 

Increased input dynamic range

The microphones and the state-of-the-art analogue input stage can handle signals up to 117dB with great sound quality. That’s very close to the full capacity of human ears and ensures a clean crisp signal, for example at music concerts.

 

Own Voice Processing (OVP)

OVP processes the wearer’s own voice completely independently from all other sounds, including all other voices. This allows you to fine-tune the hearing aids for optimal audibility of the entire acoustic environment without having to compromise this audibility to improve the sound quality of the wearer’s own voice.

 

 

 

Enhanced feedback cancellation

 

 

e2e 4.0 also synchronizes feedback cancellation between the ears in the same phase, removing more artifacts for a smoother overall sound experience.

 

Direct streaming for iOS and Android

Augmented Xperience offers direct streaming for both iOS and ASHA-compatible Android smartphones. It handles the signal of a streaming input independently from other signals, ensuring that the sound is even clearer and easier to optimize.

 

Our new platform is available in two exciting RICs: Pure Charge&Go AX and Pure Charge&Go T AX with an integrated T-coil.