Top Red Dot design awards for stellar Phonak and Oticon products
design
The 2021 Red Dot Awards list for best design includes two big hearing device producers, the Switzerland-based Phonak brand picking up a Best of the Best accolade for its earbud-resembling in-the-ear (ITE) aid, Virto Marvel Black.
Internationally recognised Red Dot design awards are also going to Denmark’s Oticon (Demant) for its More hearing aid, and again to Sonova for its Phonak Roger On remote microphone. All these awards came in the Healthcare Product Design category.
Although full celebrations of all category winners in these awards will not be celebrated until the Red Dot Design Week, June 21 to 25, the organisers have begun to release results of winners decided on by the jury of some 50 international experts who test and debate all entries individually. The Healthcare category lists close to 50 winners worldwide, ranging from designs for rehab robots to virus filtration masks.
One of just two Best of the Best winners on the Red Dot Healthcare list (the other is for a bionic prosthesis hand), Phonak Marvel Virto Black was launched in January 2020 at the renowned CES technology show in Las Vegas.
Oticon More
Also seeing off fierce competition to scoop an award was Oticon’s new deep neural network hearing aid, More, which has been designed to make sound more natural by restoring sounds hearing aids have traditionally sacrificed in order to prioritise speech. The research and theory behind Oticon More is discussed in this article.
Commenting on the award win, Janne Jakobson, Vice President, Oticon Brand, Global said: ˝Winning a Red Dot for high design quality in 2021 is an achievement we are extremely proud of, especially knowing that number of entries exceeded any previous year in the awards’ 60 year history. The journey to conceive Oticon More has required an unwavering dedication by our engineers and researchers, so it is really rewarding for them to see that all of their hard work is recognized.˝
Source: Red Dot/Phonak/Oticon