Every Patient Is Unique and So Are Phonak Virto^TM Paradise Custom-Made Hearing Aids

Custom hearing aids, hearing aids built to the shape of your ear canal and outer ear, have been popular since Ronald Regan wore one in the early 1980s. While the technology inside the shell of the hearing aid  has advanced by leaps and bounds, the desire for a custom hearing aid continues to be popular amongst new patients considering their options.

There are many reasons to choose a custom hearing aid as a viable option: In-the-ear hearing aids (ITEs) can be very discreet (or even invisible), they don’t compete with eyeglasses or masks for the real estate behind the ear, they can be easier to insert and remove for those with dexterity issues, and they offer a fully customized solution—comfortable and built for the ear(s) of the owner. And, as hearing aid technology has become more advanced, hearing aid manufacturers, including Phonak, have been able to pack more features and functionalities into their ITE devices.

When deciding if an ITE is right for you, it’s best to have an open discussion with your hearing care provider (HCP) about what you want and need from a hearing solution. A great HCP will work with you to discuss your needs, goals, and wishes when it comes to the physical look of the hearing aid, and balance that with the speech understanding needs you have in your day-to-day life and the degree and type of hearing loss you have. Luckily, a Phonak solution can be found to fit your needs, lifestyle, and hearing goals, and Phonak has created many resources for HCPs to guide you through the process.

Phonak custom hearing aid innovation and technology

When it comes to custom hearing aids, Phonak has been innovating for decades: both in the audiological needs of a person with hearing loss and in the manufacturing process of building custom devices. When it comes to your listening needs, Phonak products have features designed specifically for improving speech intelligibility and reducing listening effort—automatically—in the most challenging listening environments.

For those situations where you’re listening to soft speech in quiet (tucking your kids/grandkids/nieces and nephews in to bed) or from an adjacent room (common practice in many homes), Speech Enhancer will boost those voices and give you the ability to hear. In a busy restaurant or coffee shop, StereoZoom will allow you to focus in on a voice in the crowd and allow you to stay part of the conversation. And, to further aid in those noisy places, Dynamic Noise Cancellation reduces noise around you so you can enjoy and participate in the discussion with friends, family, and colleagues.

The manufacturing of a custom product is an engineering feat. It takes a team of professionals to model, build, and test every device that leaves our facility, and we have innovated with materials and built approaches to live up to our “can build” attitude. To improve hearing in noise, we began employing Biometric Calibration in 2017. This technology—which is unique to Phonak—customizes the hearing aids response  to your ears alone, giving you better performance in background noise than those instruments that don’t employ it.

In 2018, we introduced our Virto™ Titanium hearing instrument. Titanium is half as thick as it’s acrylic shell counterpart to allow us to create the most discreet device available. Creating a device out of Titanium also has its benefits in durability. Titanium is 15 times stronger than acrylic, so hearing aids built from Titanium are extremely robust and do not become brittle or crack.

In 2020, we brought our Made-For-All technology to custom products, allowing patients to connect to Androids, iPhones, flip phones, tablets, computers, and almost anything with Bluetooth, to experience hands-free calling and exceptional streaming sound quality on top of brilliant speech understanding and crisp, natural sound in quiet and noise. Packing all of that technology into a shell that can fit into an ear is a technological marvel and innovations with manufacturing and hearing technology continue to be at the forefront of our product designs.

Is a custom hearing aid right for you?

The choice of a hearing aid style is an important one, and a custom hearing aid is a terrific solution for many ears, many degrees of hearing losses, and many different listening situations. A discussion with your HCP about your expectations from an instrument—in its look and feel and its performance in the “real world”—is imperative to ensure your success with hearing rehabilitation.

Your HCP has been educated on not only customizing the physical fit of hearing aids (with the help of Phonak), but also customizing the sound of your hearing aids to meet your specific listening needs and goals so that you may thrive social-emotionally, cognitively, and physically.