Anyone Have Experience Using a Hearing Aid with Built-In Notched Therapy?

Okay, so I just found this on the Signia (formerly Siemens brand) hearing aids site. The new ones have a built in notched therapy for tinnitus. I'm actually doing a lot better overall dealing with tinnitus but I was looking at new hearing aids to see what's out there and was wondering if it was worth it. I currently own a pair that is getting close to 4 years old (I think). The brand I have now is Siemens Pure and I remember trying either a Siemens/Signia Binax 7px or a Signia Primax 7px (I wish I could remember exactly) hearing aid which I really liked because it had a very high frequency range for amplification... up to 12 kHz which helped cut down the noticeability on certain parts of my tinnitus... I think I tried it over a year and a half ago.

I do remember it had different sounds like ocean waves crashing on the sea shore and other sounds for masking but I'm fairly sure whatever aid I tried did not have notched therapy. Maybe I am wrong but I know that if so, neither the hearing guy or I knew about it. I guess I could call up the company and find out.

Anyway, my hearing aids now are "okay" but I do remember there being a little less noticeability in my tinnitus when I had the more advanced pair but decided it wasn't worth the extra money for a new pair of aids. However, if the notched therapy works, it might push me over the edge to buy some over eBay and have them program locally. I bought the last pair at the hearing aid place but after looking on eBay, it seems they have some pre-owned ones for good prices. I guess it is a gamble buying pre-owned and online.

I am including a link for the advertised feature just in case other people who have hearing aids might be interested in trying them:

Signia: Solutions for Tinnitus

Below is an article on hearing aids with built in notch therapy. No music is required. Supposedly, this works with tonal tinnitus only. The tinnitus frequencies are programmed and the user wears them. The only brand I have seen so far with this technology is Signia:

Notch Therapy: A New Approach to Tinnitus Treatment

 

Signia says that the hearing aids "could reduce the annoyance of your tinnitus in just weeks or months."

I haven't found any reviews on the web. Does anyone know if there is something to this claim or not?

 

Hello I currently am using the Signia Pure Primax 3px. It can be programmed with a masking noise (ocean) which I had for 3 months. It covered my sound to a degree and sometimes it was pretty low but it did not eradicate the tinnitus.

I now have it programmed with the notch therapy for the past 6 weeks. I was told this therapy can take a very long time. The sound is not covered at all so I always have some background noise to help mask it. That is the toughest part of the notch therapy you hear the ginnigux all the time. As I understand since the hearing aid is notched every sound be it voices, music or TV it becomes notched to my hearing in the left ear. That is my bad ear.

I can’t honestly say if it’s working so far though I did experience almost silence yesterday. From 8:15 to 10:15 my left it was almost silent. I could faintly hear the whisper of a sound. That is the longest stretch of quiet I’ve had in almost a year except when I’m free of stress holding/being with my newborn grandson. Today it’s been a beast all day. If this is a sign it’s beginning to work I think it’s too early to tell.

 

@JasonP Rather than start my own thread, I thought I’d continue yours. I have had tonal tinnitus for almost 50 years due to acoustical trauma from my war. It is severe and has driven me into a deep depression which meds and CBT is trying to pull me out of. For my tinnitus, I have great audiologist who have been working hard to help me. I recognize there is no cure today but I can survive when doctors and audiologist work together to help me manage my tinnitus. It’s taken me a while but I’ve come to understand that, if I can’t get rid of it today, then maybe I can manage it just enough to survive. Which brings me to your thread here.

I’ve been fortunate that the VA has tried to help me, including upgrading my hearing aids as the technology changes. Well, I have just been given a pair of Signia Pure 312 7nx hearing aids with notch technology. My audiologist put me in a sound room to try to broadly isolate the frequency of my tinnitus. Interestingly enough, she figured out my tinnitus had 2 tones together, a low frequency and a high frequency together. I was not wearing my hearing aids in the sound room. From that test, it seemed the low frequency was more dominant. My hearing loss is in the higher frequencies.

She then hooked me up to her computer and also put in the Signia notch therapy hearing aids to get closer to the frequency notch to program into the hearing aids. With the amplification, we learned that the better frequency to notch was the high frequency which was in the range of my hearing loss. She programmed in the notch. She also programmed in several profiles. Finally she programmed in 2 masking type sounds....a pure noise (I chose the pink noise) and an ocean sound that varied. These 2 sounds were much lower in volume than the masking sounds in my previous Resound maskers. She cautioned that none of this totally removes the tinnitus but rather attempts to push it into the background to help me manage. My tinnitus has been so severe and with me so long, it was driving me mad. I am willing to try anything. She says it takes about a month to adapt to the notch therapy and I’ll go back in a month for her to fine tune the program.

The notch therapy runs in the background; that is, with amplification only, you don’t know that the hearing aids are doing anything. My first reaction after it was programmed was that, while I could still hear my tinnitus and it was very loud, I was able to hear more clearly in spite of the tinnitus. This is hard to describe but, in the past, I couldn’t hear or understand well through the tinnitus. It was my sense that, while the tinnitus is still there, it didn’t seem to get in the way as bad. Also, when she set up the maskers, the maskers seem to be as helpful as the older hearing aid maskers but at a lower volume. In the past, I had problems carrying on a conversation with the maskers running at the same time. With the masker volume lower in the new Signia’s, they still provided relief and I could also hear external sounds I never heard before.

The hearing aids are controlled with an app on my iPhone that gives me quite a bit of control over the operation of the hearing aids. Also, during setup, the computer was able to program the hearing aids so that my own voice actually sounded better to me. There is also a program built into the app that allows me to change the direction the hearing aids see. By that, I mean, if I’m in a noisy restaurant having dinner with another person, I can set the hearing aid to focus towards that person and diminish sounds behind and beside me.

I’m to use it for a month and report back it’s effectiveness for fine tuning. To repeat, it doesn’t make the tinnitus go away but helps the user to manage how the tinnitus affects their daily life. My audiologist said the goal is to help me push it in the background enough to improve the quality of my life until the day arrives when it can be cured. I’ll have to update your thread in a month as I become accustomed to these new hearing aids. But, today, I can say that I’ve heard sounds I haven’t heard in a long time and, while my tinnitus is still there, I’ve made it through today a bit better than yesterday.

This is my experience with the Signia hearing aids with notch technology and I’ll update after the 30 day appointment. In my heart, if these hearing aids keep me from wanting to permanently end my torture myself, then they have done their job and helped me to manage and cope to live another day.

 

I am so sorry to hear about your suffering. I really hope they can find a cure soon. Thank you so much for the detailed response and I am so glad you are able to hear a little better now that you have them. I actually just finished a two week trial of the Signia 7nx hearing aids and it was interesting. Since it was a free trial for only 2 weeks I didn't want the guy to go through the trouble of doing a notch therapy for me. One interesting feature it had was that it can hook up to the bluetooth on an iPhone to stream music or answer calls. These functions only work on an iPhone though but it does have an android app for the direction tuning like you were talking about. I discovered though that if you don't disconnect from bluetooth each time, it can drain your batteries even if you aren't streaming anything. I did enjoy them and the when I streamed the sound from the iPhone it sounded great and provided me a little different way I could mask my tinnitus. I really hope they help you and if not, that you find something that will. Thanks again for your very detailed response and please let us know how the notch therapy goes.

 

Jason, I might suggest you find another free trial that lasts at least a month and do have the notch set and programmed in. My audiologist told me to report back in 30 days to fine tune the program. In the clinical trials that Signia ran, they noted changes in perception at around the 3 week mark. This morning, as I woke up, my tinnitus is raging and is over-riding the hearing aids but I’m going to use them faithfully because I trust my audiologist and my doctor. Not blind trust but because my audiologist has Meniers with tinnitus and my doctor has severe tinnitus and is using these same hearing aids to help him continue working. This doesn’t mean I will have the same result but I’m giving them both trust because they both live in our world of tinnitus so they know what I’m going through and believe in me. They both said it takes a while for the notch technology to work. I am sorry you suffer too and hope we both find peace soon.

 

@BobbyH
Any update on how the Signia Notch therapy is working for you? Has it been fine tuned? Are you getting relief?

Thanks,

 

Michael,

I’ve had them for 7 weeks now. They take a while to get used to with respect to the tinnitus. Signia says in its literature that it takes about 3 weeks to perceive improvement and they are right. I did revisit my audiologist in 4 weeks and we both agreed she had found the correct frequency of my tinnitus the first time so no readjustment was needed.

My audiologist made it perfectly clear from the start that this would not cure, nor would it totally mask, my tinnitus but rather that it could provide relief from the 24/7 constant screaming in my head. After 50 years of this and pretty much going mad from it, I was willing to try anything because, realistically speaking, I probably won’t live long enough to wait for the cure. Plus, when one has suffered as long as I have, we tend to look for any relief that might get us to tomorrow.

Ok.....for me, and this is important because what works for me may not work for you, my biggest problem with my prior hearing aids including my last pair of Resound Lynx2 hearing aids with maskers is that I could still hear the tinnitus above the external sounds being amplified so I could hear. I could also hear my tinnitus above the masker sounds. If I adjusted the masker volume to try to over-ride the tinnitus, the volume of both overwhelmed me. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t hear external conversations clearly.

What took a while for my brain to adapt to was the “notch”… not so much the tinnitus but that the hearing aids now amplified external sounds and the masker sounds on either side of my tinnitus frequency. This is hard to describe but I can tell the difference. I will say at this point that if anyone tries these hearing aids that they get a 60 day trial with a full money back guarantee if they feel it doesn’t help because it will take almost that long for your brain to adapt.

I found that the inboard maskers do not make the tinnitus go away. They do take the edge off as opposed to complete silence in the amplification mode only. In my case, my tinnitus is from acoustical trauma during the war so I do have high frequency hearing loss so I do need a certain amount of amplification to help my speech recognition. What I’ve learned is that I actually need a certain amount of low level external sounds such as conversation and/or music being inputted into the hearing aids. In the past, my tinnitus always was always at a higher volume than anything else. The prior hearing aids increased external sounds and/or the masker sounds to include the frequency of my tinnitus so consequently the tinnitus remained as the higher volume sound I perceived. With these Signia hearing aids the external sounds “around” the frequency of my tinnitus is amplified, not the sounds “at” that frequency so sometimes the perception of my tinnitus reduces enough to provide me with the relief I need to get to tomorrow.

I have learned to load music in my iPhone that bluetooth to my hearing aids that is the same beat as my fast walking speed. I can now walk through my neighborhood with the music in the background through my hearing aids and, for the first time in my life, also hear my shoes crunching in the gravel in the side of the street. In the process of doing this, my “perception” of the tinnitus reduces enough that, during that time, I have total relief. When one suffers 24/7, that relief is what I need to survive another day.

Do I still have tinnitus? Yes. Do these hearing aids give 24/7 relief? No.

Well then, what do they do? After 7 weeks with them, I’ve learned that I now have a little bit of control to help me manage my tinnitus. This is one tool of several tools I use to help me manage my survival till someone hopefully finds a cure to benefit all sufferers. I also see a psychologist to help me cope. Can he fix my tinnitus? No. But he can give me coping skills that work with the help. It was his suggestion to walk every day with these new hearing aids along with the suggestion of my audiologist to push external sounds/music that actually gave me relief. I still see an MD doctor who prescribes meds that help me to cope when my depression and anxiety from my tinnitus starts to run away from me. Thankfully, my doctor has tinnitus so he knows what I’m going through and helps me accordingly.

So this is my long answer to your questions on have they helped me and am I getting relief. The best way to answer your question is that I am sure that, if I had not gotten these when I did, if I didn’t have a great audiologist constantly working to help me, and if I didn’t have the support of my psychologist....that I would not exist to have written this post.

I hope this helped.
Bobby