Oldenburg is always worth a visit for the top international hearing aid manufacturers:
In mid-June, the fourth Hearing Aid Developer Forum will once again attract leading experts from the international hearing aid industry to spend two days openly discussing current issues in the field and launching pre-competitive initiatives. At the invitation of the HörTech Center of Competence at the University of Oldenburg, it will be possible for chief developers from competing companies to discuss the "hot" topics in the industry together with scientists and clinicians and to arrive at overarching solutions that will be further advanced in pre-competitive consortia.

"Six years ago, at the first developer forum, it was still very difficult to get the company partners to join this open research and development platform and to open their eyes to the extent that we could start joint research to solve common problems," says Prof Dr Dr Birger Kollmeier, explaining the starting point of the conferences, which have taken place every two years in Oldenburg's "The Haus des Hörens". As spokesperson for HörTech and Head of the Department of Medical Physics at the University of Oldenburg, Kollmeier is the initiator of the forum. "Manufacturers now prefer to come with their entire development team, which means we have to allocate a limited number of places."

This year's focus will be on the connection between psychoacoustically measurable functional deficits in individual hearing and various measures to compensate for them in modern, "intelligent" hearing aids, in which a model of the human hearing process is integrated. "The mixture of "hard" engineering technology, "soft" psychological test results and "theoretical" modelling is a "must" for the hearing aids of the future - in five years' time we will know what has been brought to the patient's ear from this year's developer forum," says Kollmeier.

A key element for this cross-company collaboration is the neutral position of the non-profit organisation Hörtech gGmbH, which last year made it into the top twelve research and development clusters in Germany with the cutting-edge cluster initiative "Auditory Valley" (Oldenburg/Hanover), among others.

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