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As a hearing instrument company, it's very important to have a
guiding principle that drives
what development we're doing and what innovation direction that we are taking.
It's taken us multiple years at Unitron to develop this guiding
principle.
And as engineers, we have a tendency to
put a lot of emphasis on the technology, which is crucially important, without which
nothing else would occur; however the guiding principle in our industry
is to have people accept the hearing instrument. So
as I always say to my engineering team, it's very important to always remember
that we are developing a product that
no one wants. So acceptance of the hearing instrument,
the bar is high. Any small reason
to reject the hearing instrument will be the hearing instrument will be put in
the drawer.
It's important to understand what is going to generate that patient
acceptance and we have irrefutably at Unitron, come to the conclusion
that the base of the pyramid that we stand on
to create that patient acceptance is
the comfort of the patience, and that comfort
for the patient has a couple of very important parts
to it. The first part is that
the product has to look good.
If something looks good, you're compelled to comfortably
wear it. So how it looks in the hand and then how
invisible it is on the ear is a very important part of what I will call the
psychological part
of the comfort equation for the patient.
The second part, if it looks good, you'll be compelled to wear it
and as you wear it, it needs to be comfortable while you're wearing it. If it's
uncomfortable
in any way, try wearing something that's uncomfortable for 16 hours a day,
it just will not work. So if it is comfortable to wear,
then and only then will people start to
listen to the instrument. As they start to listen to the instrument, the
acoustical comfort as the third part of the comfort equation at the base of
what we stand on,
is such that people do not like anything strange
happening acoustically. Once the patient has
established in their mind that the instrument is comfortable,
then and only then will they start paying attention to the sound quality
of the instrument and that basically means that they're going to listen to the
naturalness
of the speech of the person that is talking to them
in a quiet environment. When the instrument is comfortable
and also their sound quality is good,
then they will start giving a chance for the more advanced features of the
instrument, which is the ability to understand speech
in difficult listening situations, where it is harder
for the instrument to perform and because it needs to separate speech from
noise. So this ascension from comfort
to sound quality to performance
features is instinctively the thought process that patients go through
as they are assessing the instrument in their mind. One of the strengths that we
have
in our development center here are Unitron is that
we have a large audiology team which
acts as the representative of the customer
during our development process. That's very, very important
to keep the end in mind. What we do from an engineering point of view
only matters if it matters to the audiologist and
the patients. Often in our industry,
we tend to count features, four features, five features. At the end of the day,
that's not what's ultimately important. The important thing is that
all those features work well together
in a system and ultimately satisfy this model that we have
in terms of our philosophy of the system yielding comfort for the patient,
good sound quality for the patient, and yielding
performance for the patient in difficult listening situations, like
a stadium or a restaurant. Going up that pyramid
and being able to get to the level that
performance will matter for patients will make a big difference in their
lives.
So what does this all lead to at the end of the day?
It needs to make a tangible difference
in people's lives.