The JUMP-1 Scheme: An Example of Industry Providing Academia with Something Other Than Money

Oticon's fully digital hearing aid provides attractive possibilities for some areas of hearing aid research, far beyond Oticon's capacity to exploit them. The commercial version of this aid and its accompanying programming software provides only restricted user access to the signal processing variables in the hardware. Special versions of the hardware and software have therefore been developed for research use. This package has been offered to a number of academic research groups, for them to use in their own research (i.e. not dictated by Oticon). This paper discusses the framework chosen for the scheme, and its advantages and disadvantages for both Oticon and recipient research groups. The aim is to show that such an open approach is advantageous to both parties and to the wider community of hearing aid research, and that in some cases the best support industry can give to academia is not economic but material.