Sound solutions Phonak Communications

SOUND SOLUTIONS

Phonak Communications is the global leader in miniaturised hearing technology. Philip Yorke talked to Evert Dijkstra, the company’s managing director, about how the company is setting new digital standards in interference-free communications.

Phonak Communications is an expert in miniaturised electronics.

Phonak Communications AG, founded in Murten, Switzerland, in 1992, is a member of the Sonova Group, which has produced state-of-the-art hearing systems and wireless devices for more than 60 years. Phonak Communication’s consistent success has led it to become the clear global market and technology leader in the development, manufacture and distribution of ultra-miniaturised wireless hearing systems.

During the last ten years the company has broadened its product portfolio to include hearing products designed for professional markets such as the police, industrial workers and airline pilots. Today it offers advanced, miniaturised systems that range from dynamic hearing protection devices and prompting earpieces, to two-way radio headsets and comprehensive covert communications systems.

Dynamic results

The key to the technology that Phonak Communications produces is that its advanced signal processing technology ensures customers only hear the sounds that they want to hear, without distracting background noise or interference. This is particularly true of its latest pilot headset, the FreeCom 7000. This has been described by leading aviation journals as “The new category leader in terms of both comfort and speech intelligibility”.

In the January issue of Cockpit magazine its editor-in-chief, Max Ungricht wrote, “FreeCom 7000 surpasses anything that came before. It is perfect for demanding environments with different noise sources and offers great comfort during the entire flight”.

Mr Dijkstra said, “We are delighted that Europe’s top aviation editors are, like our customers, finding FreeCom to be a uniquely comfortable and high-performance pilot headset. Unlike restrictive muff-style products

Producing the circuit boards for Phonak’s Serenity DP+ dynamic hearing protection system

that are hot and cause tiring pressure around the head and ears, FreeCom 7000 offers total freedom from discomfort, and its sound performance is second to none.

“It is also worth remembering that hearing loss is known to result from noise levels of at least 85 decibels for more than eight hours a day,” he added, “and for pilots of planes and helicopters this is a regular occurrence. Freecom 7000 drastically reduces this risk with the additional benefit of enhanced performance and safety due to unparalleled, crystal-clear communication.”

FreeCom 7000, part of Phonak’s wider FreeCom range of headsets, is a custommoulded in-ear solution that includes a stateof-the-art noise-cancelling boom microphone. This latest release also features ‘dynamic’ level-dependent hearing protection, adjustable ambient awareness (which users particularly love), excellent speech intelligibility and the clearest possible voice transmission.

Driving a hearing revolution

In the education field, one of Phonak’s key markets, this April has seen thousands of hearing-impaired children being given the opportunity to be able to better hear and understand their teachers in class – through the launch of Roger.

Educational audiologists and teachers of the deaf traditionally prescribed hearing-impaired students with so-called ‘FM’ microphone and receiver systems, which work alongside hearing aids to significantly improve a child’s speech-innoise performance (i.e. in class) by bringing the teacher’s voice directly to the ear. An approach that has been proven to aid learning. Launched in April, Roger is the new digital gold standard that replaces FM as the best performing hearing system for understanding speech in such difficult listening environments.

This revolutionary new platform will be available for the education market from 14 June this year. “Roger surpasses all of today’s FM and equivalent digital systems in terms of its ease of use, and it offers a genuine scientific breakthrough in signal-to-noise ratio,” said Mr Dijkstra.

Roger is also the most compatible standard of its kind. Roger systems can work alongside virtually every behind-the-ear hearing aid, cochlear implant and soundfield room amplification system. The key component to Roger systems for education, the Roger Inspiro teacher microphone, is also the only such product capable of talking to Roger, FM and soundfield systems simultaneously. The result is that every child in a class, whether hearing-impaired or normal hearing, can enjoy Roger levels of speech understanding – either by listening via their Roger systems, via FM, or over the room’s ‘soundfield’ loudspeaker system.

Mr Dijkstra added, “In Roger we have developed an entirely new kind of wireless product, which is revolutionary in many respects. Because it only requires a small current of 2 milliwatts and it harnesses the flexibility of digital technology, we can also now apply this technology to the many other products in our portfolio. In other words, we now have the ability to customise our solutions. So whether a product is for educational purposes, police forces or pilots it can be easily adapted to that market while the underlying product, with its unsurpassed speech clarity, remains the same.

“We can leverage this technology for big volume production and high-performance as the standardised components go into everything that we produce. We also maintain the highest quality standards and technical support ser-

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Enhancing security for the covert market

For international undercover police and surveillance teams, two things matter above all else: uninterrupted communications and discretion. Today these challenges are met by another new technological breakthrough by Phonak: the Profilo Nano radio earpiece.

The world’s smallest, 100 per cent interference-free covert earpiece, Profilo Nano is so small it is invisible to bystanders and thanks to its proprietary transductive technology it is completely immune to the electromagnetic interference (EMI) that alarm systems, vehicles and other electronic circuits can cause. Mr Dijkstra commented, “With the launch of Profilo Nano we can offer covert professionals the discretion of the industry’s smallest ever earpiece form-factor with the confidence that zero interference brings.” n

For more on Phonak’s communication systems, visit www.phonak-communications.com and www.phonak.com/roger