The New Oticon Opn Play™ Premium Hearing Aid is a Breakthrough in Paediatric Hearing Care
Oticon Opn Play™ breaks with conventional hearing technology by opening up a new world of sound for children and ensures optimal fit for growing ears with the world’s first proactive system to prevent audible feedback without sacrificing audibility[1]
Copenhagen, Denmark, February 19th, 2019 – Industry leaders in advanced audiology and hearing aid technology, Oticon, is redefining child-friendly hearing care with the new Oticon Opn Play™ hearing aid. Building on the success of Oticon Opn™ hearing aids for adults, Oticon Opn Play™ is designed to enable children with hearing loss to benefit from Oticon’s pioneering BrainHearing™ technology. Providing access to 360° sound from the sound environment, Oticon Opn Play™ represents a whole new way for children to hear, improving the listening conditions that traditional paediatric hearing technologies provide to meet the developmental needs and day-to-day challenges of growing up with a hearing loss.
Thanks to the power of the new, revolutionary Velox S™ Platform, Oticon Opn Play™ unleashes the full potential of the Oticon open sound paradigm, opening up a whole new world of sound for children. Featuring the OpenSound Navigator™, Oticon Opn Play™ breaks with traditional technologies to be the first paediatric hearing aid to help children to effectively differentiate between speech and noise while providing 360° access to sound and helping to suppress disturbing noise., By giving children the support that they need to choose which sounds to pay attention to naturally, rather than providing unorganized access to all sounds whether relevant or not, like traditional omni directional technology, or restricting access to sound and therefore opportunities to learn like traditional directional technology, Oticon Opn Play™ delivers better speech understanding and reduced listening effort, even in noisy environments. Importantly, Oticon Opn Play™ allows children access to the incidental sounds that are vital for providing the stimulation that young minds need to develop and grow.
Children hug, play, are extremely active and their ears continuously grow, all of these factors increase the risk of feedback when wearing hearing aids. Feedback is also a challenge for hearing care professionals because it restricts their ability to provide an optimal fitting through prescribed gain, which can both compromise a child’s hearing care and comfort. Oticon Opn Play™ breaks a law of physics with new OpenSound Optimizer™ from Oticon. Driven by new ultra-fast detectors and featuring a unique and patented feedback breaker signal, Oticon Opn Play™ includes the world’s first system to prevent audible feedback without sacrificing audibility. This enables a child to be fitted with up to 6dB more gain in an open fitting or more stable gain for closed fittings. Furthermore, it provides up to 25% more speech cues to children’s brains, increasing their ability to make sense of sound and improve language development.
“We want to ensure that children have the best opportunity to learn, develop and thrive,” says Thomas Behrens, Chief Audiologist, Oticon. “Children with hearing loss are prone to delayed learning, often left behind by their peers, and unless a hearing loss is successfully addressed early this gap can increase. With Oticon Opn Play™ we are giving children the full benefit of the open sound experience, providing them 360° access to all relevant sounds, while supporting their brain to select and prioritise the sounds that are important. It is a breakthrough in paediatric hearing care to deliver this kind of support in the noisy situations that make up a day in school or day-care and we couldn’t be more pleased that we are able to offer young ears a hearing aid that can help them fulfill their potential.”
The Made for iPhone Oticon Opn Play™ offers children extensive connection capabilities, in and out of school. With 2.4GHz Bluetooth technology, Oticon Opn Play™ connects seamlessly with modern smartphones and tablets. With the optional ConnectClip accessory, Oticon Opn Play™ hearing aids can transform into a wireless headset, streaming high-quality audio for music, phone calls, and more to both ears. ConnectClip is also a handy microphone which can be very useful in challenging environments as it enhances communication where distance or noise are an issue. Children can better communicate with friends and family in the car, at the playground, or with teachers in the classroom. Oticon Opn Play™ is also compatible with FM receivers and many alternative classroom hearing solutions.
The Oticon Opn Play™ series of hearing aids include a wide range of styles, speaker levels and colours to meet the needs of most children. Notably, thanks to stable and reliable inductive charging, the new, discreet miniRITE R rechargeable lithium-ion solution provides 3-hour charging time for a full day of power and features a quick recharge function for up 5 hours of additional power in just 30 minutes.
Please check with your local Oticon representative to confirm availability in your region. Oticon Opn Play™ will be made available in the UK the week commencing 11th March 2019. For more information on Oticon visit: www.oticon.global
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About Oticon
500 million people worldwide suffer from hearing loss. The majority are over the age of 50 while eight percent are under the age of 18. It is Oticon’s ambition that our customers – hearing clinics throughout the world – prefer to use our products for people with impaired hearing. Through passion, dedication and professional expertise, Oticon develops and manufactures hearing aids for both adults and children. Oticon supports every kind of hearing loss from mild to severe and we pride ourselves on developing some of the most innovative hearing aids in the market. Headquartered out of Denmark, we are a global company and part of William Demant Group with more than 13,000 employees and revenues of over DKK 13 billion. www.oticon.global
Media Contact:
Sarah Chard, The PR Room. Email: sarah.chard@theprroom.co.uk. Phone: +44 (0) 333 9398 296
[1] using best practice and prescribed fittings