David Myers’ Blog entries for www.betterhearing.org/blog
Doubling the usefulness of hearing aids (6/1/09)
In the November 2007 Hearing Journal, Better Hearing Institute executive director Sergei Kochkin predicted that acceptance of hearing aids will grow with their increased functionality. His grand idea—putting “miniaturized internal wireless receivers in every hearing aid”—would double their usefulness. Hearing aids would serve a) as sophisticated microphone amplifiers, but also b) as wireless loudspeakers that deliver customized sound from PA systems, TVs, and telephones.
As a person with hearing loss who routinely enjoys this dual utility of hearing aids I can tell you: Sergei Kochkin is spot on. And the result is that I love my hearing aids.
My ear-opening introduction to wireless, customized loudspeakers occurred a decade ago as my wife and I worshipped within the high stone walls of the ancient Iona Abbey, off Scotland’s west coast. The worship leader’s voice, though amplified by a PA system, was foggy after reverberating to my ears. My wife, noticing a hearing assistance symbol with a “T,” nudged me to activate the telecoils in my new aids.
Voila! Suddenly a clear voice was speaking from the center of my head. The secret, I learned, was the Abbey’s hearing loop—a wire surrounding the seating that used magnetic induction to transmit information to my hearing aids.
The sudden clarity was overwhelming, an experience that I have since had in countless other British venues, from auditoriums to cathedrals to the back seats of London and Edinburgh taxis. Once, as I sat in a London airport unable to decipher the announcements about my delayed flight to Detroit, I activated my telecoil receptors and—how cool was this—found the announcements broadcast by my hearing aids. (As I sat there using wi-fi to answer e-mails, I thought: this hearing loop is to my hearing aids what the wi-fi is to my laptop!)
Wondering if this technology could work back home, I looped my TV room. To my delight, this enabled my hearing aids to serve as in-the-ear loudspeakers that deliver deliciously clear sound suited to my needs. Moreover, by using a mic + telecoil setting, I can also converse with my wife or hear the phone ring.
Thus began my efforts to support the spread of assistive listening that effectively doubles hearing aid functionality. This effort has involved
· creating www.hearingloop.org,
· promoting the installation of hearing loops in hundreds of west Michigan venues. (See Holland-Zeeland, Grand Rapids, and Grand Haven-Muskegon.)
· authoring two dozen articles.
Who knows what tomorrow’s technology may bring? Exciting alternatives, I suspect. For the present, hearing loops (aka induction loop systems) harness low-cost, miniaturized receivers that can be accommodated in virtually all hearing aids. Small wonder that there is a growing consumer push (which I will describe in a later entry) for this user-friendly assistive listening that, as Sergei Kochkin urged, puts “miniaturized internal wireless receivers” into hearing aids.
Looping beginning to spread the USA (6/11/09)
I’ve mentioned the looping of hundreds of West Michigan venues, including 40 rooms in the city’s new convention center and both concourses and all gate areas of Michigan’s second largest airport in Grand Rapids. (This is so cool: having information about flight delays, boarding, etc. broadcast by my in-the-ear loudspeakers.)
But 21st century grass-roots initiatives also have spread to other parts of the USA. Here are links to some notable efforts:
· Rochester, NY
· Tucson and the state of Arizona
· New Mexico
· Central Wisconsin
· Silicon Valley, Sonoma County, and other California locations
Adding to the momentum is the growing number of manufacturers, vendors, and installers of hearing loop equipment (see here), with two new American manufacturers launching in 2009. (Full disclosure: I am a hard of hearing psychology professor and hearing advocate, with no financial interest in any product or service.)
Hearing Loops in Europe, and with Cochlear Implants (6/19/09)
It’s not just hearing aid wearers that benefit from assistive listening via hearing loops, and it’s not just the UK that has widely installed them. Writing from Denmark, the Rev. Jan Grønberg Eriksen, then president of “Churchear, Denmark,” noted that “Here we can just install a good loop system in a theater or a church building or any meeting room (and we do—our churches are almost 100 percent covered now), and ask hard of hearing attendees to switch to T-position.”
A week ago, a woman with a cochlear implant e-mailed me excitedly:
My husband and I are travelling in Norway. We were lucky enough to get tickets for Swan Lake at the new Oslo Opera House. I noticed that it had been looped for T-coil. I flipped the switch on my processor, and the sound came in beautifully. This was stark contrast to a concert we went to at Avery Fisher Hall (Lincoln Center) in NYC the night before we left, where I borrowed an ALD which brought in mostly static.. . . When I get back, I'm going to bring this to the attention of the administration at Lincoln Center.
Today (as I write), she sent a follow-up note:
The induction loop is so common that there isn't always signage for it.
"All the churches have them," the organist at the Stavanger Cathedral told me yesterday. I haven't seen a sign in any church. I tested it out at the worship service this morning. Sure enough, when I switched on the T switch, the sound came in so clearly that I was sure I could have understood every word of the minister had she not been speaking Norwegian. . . . The sound quality was so good, I could get rhapsodic about it.
Then, a few hours later . . . how I love these e-mails . . . a woman from suburban Chicago wrote saying that their church had just been looped and that
I can certainly attest to the spread of the loop system in Michigan. Before we installed our system I telephoned a number of facilities listed by a loop vendor as having installed such a system. I was amazed to discover that not a single installed site had anything but vociferous praise for the product!!! One would expect at least one nay-sayer in a group that large (22). But there was not a single one!!!
E-mails quoted with permission.
How many hearing aids now come with telecoils? (7/18/09)
I'm periodically asked: what percent of today's new hearing aids come with telecoils (which receive magnetic input from hearing aid compatible phones and from hearing loops). A decade ago, 30 percent was the common estimate. Recently, two annual surveys of hearing professionals reported by the Hearing Journal (see Figure 4 here and here) have both reported 62 percent. This increase is thanks partly to the surge in behind-the-ear (BTE) aids, most of which come with telecoils (though, sadly, not yet all the new mini-BTE aids). People withsignificant hearing loss and need for hearing assistance mostly wear BTE aids, which explains why 84 percent of Hearing Loss Association of America members in one survey reported having telecoils.
The March/April 2009 Hearing Review Products offered a technology guide to in-the-ear (ITE) hearing aids marketed by a dozen companies(Audifon, Audina, Bernafon, Oticon, Phonak, ReSound, Siemens, Sonic Innovations, Starkey, Unitron, Widex, and Rexton). Voila!, all 35 ITE models--100%--are now coming with telecoils. Ditto, it seems, for today’s modern cochlear implants.
Happily, hearing loops can serve 100 percent of people, including those without telecoils or even without hearing aids. That’s because all assistive listening systems come with portable receiver/headsets (though very few folks, at the point of their need, will take the initiative to get up, locate, wear, and return such).
(Note: Photo courtesy Tibbetts, now Global Coils.)
Hearing-Friendly Scotland (9/23/09)
Ah, Scotland. Last week I returned from a month in the bonnie land. On arrival at Glasgow Airport one is greeted, before exiting customs, with a hearing assistance hearing loop sign in the baggage claim area. Outside the airport, I ride in a looped Glasgow taxi which broadcasts the driver’s voice to the back seat.
And so it goes, with loop signs evident “everywhere” (said my wife) in St. Andrews where we have spent two years: at a Boots (like Walgreens) pharmacy checkout, in the churches, at a county office information station, at the golf course starter boxes, and at the post office windows. In all these St. Andrews venues, the systems were working fine, as I acknowledged to a postal clerk by pointing at the sign and giving my thumbs up.
Who wouldn’t love hearing aids in this hearing-friendly environment? The UK hearing industry and culture enables hearing aids to serve as wireless loudspeakers in so many places.
Hearing Loops International Conference (10/1/09)
A first international “Hearing Loops International Conference,” hosted by the European Federation of Hard of Hearing People, was held last weekend [September, 2009] near Zurich, Switzerland and convened by EFHOH vice-president Siegfried Karg.
The conference was attended by nearly 100 people from fifteen nations, nearly all of whom were people with hearing loss or hearing organization and industry representatives. American participants included the HLAA’s executive director (Brenda Battat) and past board president (Richard Meyer), Hearing Access Program chair Janice Schacter, Wisconsin audiologist Juliette Sterkens and her loop engineer husband LeRoy Maxfield, two representatives of American loop companies (Fred Palm of Assistive Audio and Terry Simon of Wireless Hearing Solutions), and yours truly.
Some take-home points:
· Loop manufacturers want to recreate the listening clarity, as signal to noise ratio, that we would experience if standing one foot from someone speaking. (That was precisely my experience when I first encountered a hearing loop, at Scotland’s Iona Abbey.)
· In the Nordic countries, including Finland, I was told by a Swedish hearing industry representative, assistive listening is almost entirely via hearing loops (as increasingly I am noting in the UK as well, including the back seats of London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh taxis, at 11,500 post office windows, and in most churches and cathedrals with PA systems).
· Phonak representative Dr. Volker Kühnel, reported that Nordic country hearing aids all come with a default t-coil setting. Although a Swiss audiologist noted that some Swiss choose the cosmetics of completely-in-the-canal aids over the functionality of aids with telecoils, Karg noted that most Swiss hearing aids have telecoils because Swiss audiologists generally prioritize functionality over cosmetics.
· Conny Andersson, the CEO of Swedish manufacturer Bo Edin, told me that his company annually sells, in Sweden alone, 10,000 of their small Univox amplifiers for TV room use. (Extrapolated from Sweden’s 9.2 million people to the USA’s 300 million, that would be the proportional equivalent of 300,000 American home sales a year, or 3 million homes in a decade.)
· Richard Brooks of UK loop manufacturer Ampetronic demonstrated strategies for maintaining an even field strength in modern buildings with embedded metal, and for containing sound with minimal spillover (see video).
· Loop engineer whiz David Norman not only explained the International Electotechnical Commission (IEC) standards for loop installations (see video), he also did a clever loop installation in our Zurich University of Applied Sciences meeting hall. In addition to the room’s own hearing loop, which played music during interludes, David installed a second loop that broadcast the conference in English to those seated on the left, and, through a third loop, in German translation to those seated on the right.
Among several excellent presentations was a PowerPoint slide show by Janice Schacter, (see video) with photos of loop installations from around the world, and a presentation by Brenda Battat (video soon here) on her and HLAA’s successful efforts to support the requirement of volume-controlled, hearing aid compatible phones (meaning phones capable of inductive coupling and without interference). Brenda attributed the success of this initiative to a collaboration that engaged both industry and consumer representatives (and she and I anticipate further discussions of a possible follow-up meeting in the USA that might explore new possibilities for extending hearing aid compatibility to assistive listening). “One of my long term goals,” Brenda explained to the conferees, is seeing research bring us to the point “where hearing aids do the job and we don’t need other assistive devices.”
Such was the gist of the conference’s concluding resolution, adopted with virtual unanimity (and without dissent from any of the American representatives), recommending that
1) hearing aid manufacturers, manufacturers of cochlear implants, physicians, audiologists and hearing instrument specialists shall communicate the benefits of hearing aid/cochlear implant telecoil receivers for phone listening and assistive listening and educate people who are hard of hearing accordingly.
2) venues and service points where sound is broadcast shall offer assistive listening, such as induction loop systems designed to the IEC 60118-4:2006 standard, that broadcast sound directly to hearing aids and cochlear implants, enabling them to serve as customized, wireless loudspeakers (without the need for extra equipment).
The full resolution, and a supporting discussion paper, are now available at the conference website. This statement from the global hearing loss community will surely encourage and add credibility to all who envision a future in which hearing aids have doubled functionality, by serving as affordable in-the-ear loudspeakers wherever sound is broadcast.
Scientific American on Hearing Loops (10/20/09)
Scientific American has posted an article on induction loops.ﾠ This, along with other encouraging developments, represents another small step toward a tipping point where assistive listening in the USA will become hearing aid compatible, as it has become in the Nordic countries and the UK.
California Audiology Firm Wins Award for Hearing Loop Initiative (10/22/09)
Santa Rosa’s Kenwood Hearing Solutions, an audiology practice owned by Bill and Christine Diles, has received an award from the Sonoma County Mayors’ Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities for “Innovative Media and Technology.” In addition to looping a number of bank teller stations, churches, and community facilities, Kenwood provides home TV room installations—10 to 15 a month, in more than 1600 homes to date—with the purchase of new hearing aids. With their hearing aids now also serving as customized loudspeakers, the result has been many happy patients, fewer returns of hearing aids, and new word-of-mouth patient referrals. Bill Diles also has gathered data that documents people’s appreciation: