When personal purpose finds its professional expression

after being fitted with a hearing aid, or the happiness in the eyes of an older person telling me that he can hear the birds again. One concert I will never forget featured school-age children singing and playing musical instruments beautifully, before introducing themselves and sharing the age at which they had received cochlear implants.

There is nothing more fulfilling than seeing these happy people and knowing that my daily work contributes to their well-being, helping them live their lives more fully despite hearing loss. When speaking about hearing care or “hearing well-being”, many people still imagine hearing aids as large, unattractive devices based on outdated technology.

Advanced technology
From my experience at Sonova, I can say that many people would be surprised to see how far technology has evolved. The market now offers small, discreet devices that provide universal Bluetooth connectivity (both Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy) to more than 6 000 smartphones, regardless of whether they operate on Android or iOS. These devices also support the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile for high-quality audio.

Reliable wireless connectivity is achieved through adaptive frequency hopping, allowing users to stay connected to their computer while streaming audio from their phone, without interference from other technologies operating in the same radio spectrum.

In addition, the latest hearing instruments on the market by various manufacturers implement some form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) .Those offered by our company, incorporate real-time AI powered by a Deep Neural Network (DNN) chip, enabling remarkable separation of speech from noise. By improving the signal-to-noise ratio, this AI allows users to better understand speech from any direction and to participate in dynamic group conversations without constantly turning their heads.

Before incorporating AI into hearing instruments, we trained and tested it extensively to ensure its ethical and responsible use and to avoid bias, ensuring, for example, that it performs equally well when processing speech from female and male voices, from elderly people and children, and across different languages.

When it comes to AI-based denoising, care has also been taken to ensure that surrounding noise is attenuated to acceptable, non-disturbing levels, but not eliminated entirely, so that users retain situational awareness for their own safety, especially outdoors, where sounds such as approaching cars or ambulance sirens must remain audible.

When engineers ask me, “How do we know what the right operating parameters are for such products?”, I answer “Read the applicable ETSI standards.”

Inevitably, constantly pushing technology boundaries and bringing innovations to market means continuously redefining the state of the art. This, in turn, requires the regular revision of existing standards to take account of recent technological developments. In other words, active participation in regulatory and standards development, especially in the radio-frequency domain, is essential to stay ahead of the latest advances in the field.

A complete ecosystem for hearing care
What many people do not know is that our company provides not only hearing aids and cochlear implants, but also a complete hearing-care ecosystem, designed to help people stay active in noisy everyday situations. One important factor in improving speech understanding in noisy environments is the Roger remote microphone range. Depending on users’ needs, there are remote microphones for every situation, from personal or partner microphones to complete school systems. Parents of young children, for example, often prefer small personal microphones that allow them to talk to their children while they are playing outside.

In the classroom
At school, teachers can use a range of microphones connected in a network for co-teaching, linking them to the Roger classroom sound-field system, streaming audio from the teacher’s PC, and synchronising their microphones with the pass-around microphones that can be used by all children in the classroom. This allows children with hearing impairment who use hearing aids or cochlear implants, and who have Roger receivers installed to follow mainstream lessons alongside the other children. It also helps them socialise more effectively from an early age and attend non-specialised schools.

 Source: Sonova AG

Furthermore, children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD or other conditions of the autism spectrum, who may also find classroom noise distracting and distressing, can benefit from such remote microphones to help them stay focused on the sounds and speech that matter. As such children have normal hearing and do not require hearing aids, they can use ear-level Roger receivers to connect to Roger microphones.

And in care homes
Interestingly, Roger microphone systems can also be used effectively in care homes to help older people participate more in daily activities and remain active. This is extremely important in the fight against dementia and cognitive decline, as confirmed by scientific studies published over the past three years, showing that “in older adults at increased risk for cognitive decline, hearing intervention slowed down loss of thinking and memory abilities by 48 % over 3 years” , According to the WHO around 95.1 million children aged 5-19 years live with hearing loss worldwide. By 2050, nearly 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss, and more than 700 million will require hearing rehabilitation. For me, this makes helping as many people as possible, especially children, particularly meaningful in my daily work: challenging technology, shaping standards and regulations, and enabling the most innovative products to reach the people who need them, so that they can live their lives without the limitations imposed by hearing difficulties.

Source: Sonova AG

How ETSI standards help

When we talk about integrating wireless technologies in our products – hearing aids, cochlear implants, wireless accessories and remote microphones – it is clear to us that they must be designed to comply with the applicable ETSI standards, depending on the operating frequency range, such as ETSI EN 300 328, ETSI EN 300 330, ETSI EN 300 440, ETSI EN 300 422 and ETSI EN 301 489.

On the one hand, compliance with ETSI harmonised standards, the titles of which are published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU), is the easiest way to demonstrate conformity with the Radio Equipment Directive (RED, EU Directive 2014/53/EU). On the other hand, compliance with ETSI standards also helps us place our products on the markets of non-European countries in Africa and Asia, where compliance with ETSI standards is also recommended.

In addition, compliance with ETSI standards gives us confidence that our designs will most likely also comply with local radio spectrum standards in other countries, thanks to technology’s state of the art and the various cooperation agreements ETSI has signed in the field of standards development.

Our company has been an ETSI Full member for about 20 years, and we actively participate in standards development in our areas of expertise. It is important to note that ETSI’s work is extremely valuable for European manufacturers not only because of the development of harmonised standards supporting compliance with the RED, but also because of the many other standards, technical specifications and technical reports it publishes. These provide valuable guidance in areas such as risk assessment for radio devices, cybersecurity, and ecodesign, including life cycle assessments (LCA).

Dr. Neviana Nikoloski
Senior Manager Regulatory Affairs, IPR & TQM, SONOVA Communications AG
Former Chair of ETSI General Assembly