Hong Kong, July 24, 2002 - Siemens Medical Instruments Pte Ltd (SMI) today set a new benchmark - announce the launch of TRIANO 3, the world's first digital hearing system equipped with three directional microphones, in Hong Kong.

Mr Clifton Hong, Sales & Marketing Director, Asia Pacific, SMI, addressed at a press conference today, "TRIANO^TM ushers in a whole new dimension for hearing impaired people. This new hearing system offers superb sound quality efforts and improves speech understanding in noise. TRIANO 3 is the world's first digital hearing instrument equipped with TriMic^TM three-microphone directional technology, which provides a quantum leap in directional technology and represents a significant improvement in speech intelligibility of up to 30%. Users will improve their quality of life and hearing will be so much more pleasant."

Mr KF Lai, Managing Director, Kowloon Hearing Services Ltd, said, "The use and development of hearing instruments in Asia has a short history of about 10 years. Traditionally, Asians view hearing impairment as a form of handicap and the hearing impaired are often not accepted socially. Due to the lack of audiological healthcare knowledge and information, hearing instruments are not commonly used and the market penetration of such products is relatively low. With increasing healthcare knowledge, people are more ready to use hearing instruments and instruments to ameliorate their hearing problem and improve their hearing comfort. More importantly, the modern hearing instruments are developed from most innovative and advanced technology, with appealing designs that are effective and easy-to-use."

SMI offers a complete and diverse family of hearing systems in the TRIANO 3 family. Ranging from the smallest in-the-ear micro CIC (Completely-in-the-Canal) to super power BTE (Behind-the-Ear) ones, TRIANO^TM offers a complete family of hearing solutions for all degrees of hearing loss for people of all ages.

TRIANO^TM hearing instruments are all developed with the Speech Comfort System^TM offering the following benefits:

Automatic Situation Detection - Each individual's listening ability is unique. The Automatic Situation Detection analyses the individual's listening situation automatically by detecting incoming speech signals.

Signal Optimisation - This system minimises the individual's listening effort by classifying the situation into one of many common types of listening situations. The environment's sounds are then processed in a 16-channel signal processing system to enhance speech and reduce noise specifically for that situation. TRIANOTM hearing instruments adjust to the listening environment within one automatic program eliminating the need for the individual to manually switch programs.

Automatic Directional Microphone - The system automatically amplifies sounds coming from the person in front of the individual wearing a TRIANOTM hearing instrument, while minimising the competing signals from behind, or around them.

Special designs for children and adolescents, as well as the Audio Shoe, a connector for FM systems for school tuition or a personal cassette/CD player, are also available, making TRIANO^TM particularly attractive to young people.

Dr Tang, ENT surgeon said, "From the medical standpoint, hearing loss can be generally classified into two types. Disorder of conductive hearing loss can usually be cured by medication or surgery. However, disorder of sensorineural hearing loss which is common to old age, cannot be relieved by medication or surgery and people suffering from moderate hearing loss of such kind will have to depend on hearing instruments to help them."

Research has proven that directional microphones improve speech understanding in many different types of noisy situations. Siemens is the only company currently able to offer TriMic^TM three-microphone directional technology to maximise speech understanding by providing the highest degree of directional improvement available. In many studies, directional microphones have proved to be most beneficial for the hearing impaired in these situations where the signal-to-noise ratio is bad. The Al-DI (Articulation Index weighted - Directivity Index), which is a measure for the improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio, is increased by about 30 percent for the TriMicTM technology. This corresponds to an improvement in speech intelligibility of up to 30%.