Oticon Delta hearing aid

red dot: best of the best
red dot award: product design 2006

Intelligent accessory -
changes for the quality of life
Only few decades ago, hearing aids were associated with a decline in a person's quality of life. These devices looked like "aiding instruments" - they stigmatised the user because hearing loss was felt to be a flaw. In recent years, however, the medical field has experienced constant change through designs that can also change the individual perception of hearing loss. The Oticon Delta is a hearing aid that combines an unusual triangular shape with innovative technologies. Its triangular design makes it look rather like a high-tech communication system than a conventional hearing aid. It has been designed for a younger target group who carry it with self-confidence, matching it to their individual lifestyle. In order to do so, users can swap and vary between different colour casings - the hearing aid thus turns into an accessory. This has become possible, above all, through a design that places the speaker itself directly in the ear canal at the tip of a thin, transparent tube. It is carried invisibly in the ear canal, instead of being placed inside the housing behind the ear. The resulting device is tiny and cannot be seen even when looking from behind the wearer. The innovative shape of the housing features high-performance technology, close to the principles of artificial intelligence. It imitates the ability of the brain to filter out and acoustically optimise speech even in loud environments. Its AI-system calculates and processes the signals in an "intelligent" way and a microprocessor handles millions of data bits per second in order to reduce background noise. A special directionality system - multiband adaptive directionality - is able to cancel out up to three noise sources from different directions and focus on the important speech signals.