The weekly round-up is a little collection of blog posts, articles, news, etc that I’ve enjoyed or found useful in the last week. If you’ve read something good or if you’ve got a website/article/press release/whatever that you’d like to see featured in coming weeks then please get in touch.
TV Ears are running a competition to win one of their Wireless Speakers. To stand a chance of winning you have to go to either their Facebook (www.facebook.com/tvears) or Twitter page (www.twitter.com/tvears). Competition closes on March 21 2011, winner drawn at random.
The weekly round-up is a little collection of blog posts, articles, news, etc that I’ve enjoyed or found useful in the last week. If you’ve read something good or if you’ve got a website/article/press release/whatever that you’d like to see featured in coming weeks then please get in touch.
The world’s most sophisticated hearing aid is being launched in the UK combining an unrivalled level of performance with a stylish design. Enclosed in a luxurious ceramic housing, the tiny device – just 2cm in length – sits discreetly behind the ear and allows optimum hearing in all environments.
The Audéo S SMART Ceramics, developed by Phonak, the world’s leading manufacturer of hearing instruments, is the first ever hearing aid to utilise a premium quality material and takes a step forward from traditional polymer housings. Due to its versatile properties ceramics are used in a variety of other luxury consumer products such as knife blades, watch casings and even protect space shuttles on re-entry into the atmosphere.
The hearing aid’s sleek ceramic housing provides a highly-polished, scratch-resistant surface for the discerning customer as well as hypoallergenic properties to reduce skin irritation. Cool to touch, the material quickly reaches body temperature and reduces perspiration behind the ear.
Audéo S SMART Ceramics is powered by the newest Phonak microchip technology which allows the user to accurately identify subtle sound changes in the environment and control the volume directly at the ear, via a push button or with a remote control. It also offers unlimited wireless connectivity to TVs, telephones and MP3 players.
Approximately 12 million people (one in five adults) in Britain currently experience hearing difficulties and this figure is expected to rise to one in three by 2025.
Suitable for mild to moderate hearing loss, the Audéo S SMART Ceramics will help meet a growing demand from the baby boomer generation, the young at heart consumers in their 50s and 60s who want to boost their hearing to stay at their best but don’t want to draw attention to a problem typically associated with ageing. According to experts, people currently struggle for 10 years on average before seeking advice.
Furthermore, the Audéo S SMART’s unique combination of sophisticated audio technology and luxurious exterior has just beaten product entries from more than 35 countries to win the prestigious international iF product design award. Since their introduction in 1953, the iF awards have been a reliable indicator of outstanding quality in design.
Phonak UK MD, Stuart Neilson, says “Stylish, sophisticated and smaller in size, the Audéo S SMART Ceramics is a significant advancement in hearing technology. The high value, ceramic device is both stylish in look and powerful in performance, ensuring strong appeal with the younger market.”
Audéo S SMART Ceramics will be available from private audiologists nationwide and will be launched in the UK from February 2011. Visit www.phonak.co.uk for further information.
How often do you listen and how often do you just hear? Listening and hearing, the same thing, right?
Megan was kind enough to publish a guest post from me on her Hearing Sparks blog about hearing, listening and how you can improve your listening skills. Go and check it out: Listening Vs Hearing.
In fact, even if you don’t want to read my bit over there you should still visit Hearing Sparks, it’s a great blog.
Deafness Research UK is a charity that helps to create radical improvements in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of all forms of hearing impairment. Andrew Goodwin is their Information and Outreach Advisor and he kindly agreed to take some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions:
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Deafness Research UK?
[Andrew Goodwin] My name is Andrew Goodwin and I’m the Information and Outreach Advisor at Deafness Research UK. My job is twofold. The first bit is to manage the advisory service, keeping our factsheets up-to-date and answering queries from the public. The second part of the job is the outreach side of things. I go out with our Bionic Ear Show up and down the country, visiting schools, businesses and various community groups. At these shows, I give hearing tests for people and offer advice on a whole range of problems to do with the ear, such as infections and hearing loss.
How is your Bionic Ear Show received? Are people generally positive towards having their hearing tested? Do you meet a lot of people who have hearing loss but who won’t accept it or do anything about it – is it possible to convince those people to get something done? Do you encounter any stigma towards hearing loss?
[Andrew Goodwin] The feedback over the last year or show has been tremendous! We generally get 5 out of 5 from teachers, school kids of all ages and even tough men working on oil rigs in the north sea! We recently were at an exhibition in Reading, Berkshire and over the 3 days, we tested over 250 people. It was so easy to get people sat down in front of the screeners as most people are concerned about their hearing. Not enough to go to the docs, but are willing to get it screened. The majority were not surprised by the results, but I would say around 10% got a shock, especially those who had noise related hearing loss. We do get a few tears! Fortunately, I’m able to inform people in the next steps to take and have excellent factsheets which can help. I do work hard at convincing people, especially those with noise related hearing loss to do something. Having bright blue hearing aids is a real boon here as I can point to them as say, “You really don’t want to start wearing things like these!” Getting people to turn down their MP3 players or listen to them in a sensible manner is a bit of a crusade of mine.
The biggest problem is when I come across people who have age related hearing loss. Most people either refuse to believe me, or don’t recognise the severity of their loss, or have a hearing aid but keep it in the bedside drawer rather than in their ears where it would do some good. Recent research suggested that the average age people are fitted with aids is around 65, but the age when the start wearing them is around ten years later.
All of this confirms that there is still a stigma around hearing loss; especially age related hearing loss. This is slowly being eroded by two things, people are losing their hearing earlier due to a significant increase in noise related hearing loss; the second being the improvement of hearing aids, visually as well as technically. The fact that we now have more people in their 40’s and 50’s wearing slightly funky hearing loss will help break down the stigma. Nobody thinks twice about wearing glasses as they are so much a fashion item. When you see people like Vivienne Westwood, Tom Ford and Brad Pitt wearing cool aids, then they won’t be such an item of derision…I hope!
What kinds of research are you doing at the moment?
[Andrew Goodwin] some of the studies we are doing at the moment are on hearing loss, improving the quality of the hearing aid programs and tinnitus treatments.
I was always under the impression that hearing aid manufacturers developed their own programme’s in isolation in a kind of battle to see who could release the latest and greatest. Do new programmes tend to get created by researchers like yourself and then developed by the manufacturers?
[Andrew Goodwin] Most manufactures do their own development, but we also have independent researchers who then work with manufacturers. There are a couple of researchers here at the Ear Institute and other places around the UK that are looking at improving the algorithms used by the computers inside hearing aids.
Do you think we will see a cure for sensorineural hearing loss and tinnitus in our lifetime? Are we close?
[Andrew Goodwin] I’m very very confident that we will see some treatments for tinnitus in the next 10 years becoming a reality. Hearing loss will have to wait a bit longer! The whole auditory system is incredibly complex. Much more so than vision. Scientists have now realised just h much of what we “hear” actually goes on in the brain rather than in the cochlea.
I’ve read a bit about stem cell replacement operations being performed in Asia but I’ve never seen it mentioned in the western hearing press – is stem cell replacement a reality? Is it something we could all benefit from soon?
[Andrew Goodwin] As you can imagine, stem cell therapy is such a huge ethical issue, any researcher worth their salt will be treading very carefully indeed. You may have heard numerous stories of people being “cured” of hearing loss, but nothing has been released in respected journals, such as Nature, so I would treat these stories with caution. The reality is that research is going on, but no proper, clinically proven effective treatment is available at the moment, anywhere in the world.
There is some good news though, last year, scientists released a paper (in Nature and other scientific journals) showing for the first time in the history of this planet, hair cells in a mouse’s cochlea, regrowing after being damaged. Up till then, no mammal could do this. Reptiles, birds and fish all have the ability to regrow hair cells after damage, but no mammals. This is incredibly exciting and “could” lead to a treatment many years down the line.
The introduction of digital hearing aid technology brought huge benefits, do you think we will ever see anything so ground-breaking again? What will we be wearing in our ears in five year’s time?
[Andrew Goodwin] The introduction of digital technology was a quantum leap forwards for people who could benefit from them, me included! When I lost my hearing, it was only digital aids that were able to give me the semblance of hearing and I had to wait 18 months between losing the hearing and technology catching up; so I’m very grateful for digital technology. In the future, I don’t think we will have so much of a huge leap forwards other than better processing algorithms and better microphones. This will allow the hearing aids to give us better quality sound in a variety of situations, including the holy grail of hearing a single voice at a party!
Is there any way we can get involved with Deafness Research UK?
[Andrew Goodwin] YES! Our primary aim is to raise funds so that we can fund research into the causes of hearing loss and possible cures. We’ve got people running the London marathon, holding coffee mornings and everything in between. If people want to help fund-raise for us, we’ve got a team standing by for your call! On top of that, the FREE Bionic Ear Show I mentioned goes out to schools and businesses round the UK, so if you want us to visit your school, give free hearing screening to the staff where you work again, just drop me a line.
A massive, massive thank-you to Andrew for taking the time to answer my questions!
I created a web-application for hearing aid practices a while back, it’s called Earmeter – essentially, it’s a patient-engagement tool that aims to help both the hearing professional and the patient get the most from each other. I’ve started a blog on the Earmeter site, it will be more industry-focused than Hearing Aid Know, I’ll still be writing on here too. This is a snippet of the first post on there, about using an iPad:
Hearing aid consumers are becoming more tech-savvy all the time, baby-boomers and younger patients are already using the latest gadgets in their everyday lives, so why not bring your consultation up to date with some new technology for your patient?
A tablet computer for the patient to use during consultations is potentially a great way to help them to understand their hearing loss, hearing aids and to keep them fully engaged in the process of improving their hearing.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that I’ve been wearing a pair of Audiosync iSync hearing aids (also know as Starkey Otolens). On a recent visit to my audiologist I got the opportunity to try out Starkey’s Voice IQ software upgrade and because I didn’t want to send my iSyncs back to Starkey, and be without them for a week, we decided to get the Voice IQ upgrade in my S Series instead.
So, I’ve been wearing my S Series 11 with Voice IQ for about a month now.
It is better noise reduction. All modern digital hearing aids have dynamic noise reduction (DNR) capabilities, which means that the aid is always monitoring your environment and trying to reduce unwanted background noises and emphasise speech as much as possible. The tricky thing with doing this is being able reduce the volume of the noise without reducing the volume of speech.
Typically, noise reduction will happen between words and in other gaps in speech. Starkey’s IQ does that but it reduces noise between the syllables of words too. To show you what I mean by that, look at the two sentences below, the first is a typical noise reduction technique and the second is the IQ, the point where noise reduction occurs is show with a *.
“Hello,*I’d*like*a*bag*of*bananas*please”
“He*llo,*I’d*li*ke*a*bag*of*ba*na*nas*pl*ease”
So you can see that IQ suppresses background noises in the middle of words too. Well, that’s my understanding of how it works anyway – regardless, the really important question is:
Short answer: yes. It has surprised me in that it has helped me to understand speech in situations that I wouldn’t normally associate with the need for noise reduction. Here’s a few examples of where (and what) I’ve been able to hear much more clearly with IQ:
I’ve been really impressed with how I’ve noticed voices breaking through the background noises that used to be masking them. I think breaking through sums up IQ perfectly for me: I used to have a lot of situations where voices where in the background and masked by other noises but IQ has flipped that situation around and put the voices in front of the noise.
So is it worth it?
Whenever I review hearing aids I always get emails from people asking if they are worth buying, which is normally hard to answer because they cost a lot of money and seeing as I haven’t tried out every aid on the market it is difficult to compare one to another. But I strongly recommend Voice IQ without any hesitation. If you have bought an S Series or other Starkey aid that supports IQ then I think you will see massive benefits from it.
Because it is a software upgrade then you should be able to try a compatible Starkey model with and without it. You could trial your new aids for a few weeks without Voice IQ, get the upgrade, and trial again with it. You will definitely hear a big difference.
I’ve just discovered the ExSilent hearing aid brand thanks to the always-informative Hearing Mojo. ExSilent is a young company from the Netherlands that produces invisible hearing aids that sit deep in the canal.
Hearing Mojo is covering ExSilent’s new QLeaf Pro aid that has a feature that allows you to change programmes by tapping gently the outside of your ear. The problem being that invisible hearing aids sit so deep that it would be very difficult to press a button on the hearing aid’s shell – Starkey solved this problem with their iSyncs by letting you switch programmes and other settings using either a remote control or your mobile phone. Others use a magnetic wand that you wave close to your ear.
Read David’s piece on Hearing Mojo for an explanation of ExSilent and their products.
As I said above, I hadn’t heard of ExSilent before and I’ve just visited their website for the first time and I was struck by their brand photos on there. Here’s one from their site:
Amazing! It took me a good 20 seconds to even see the hearing aid in that picture (it looks better on their site that it does on here). If that’s not saying, “your hearing aid is part of your wardrobe, don’t fear it” I don’t know what is. It’s this kind of advertising that will help bring hearing aids into the mainstream and make them something that people are comfortable wearing.
Earlier this year World of Warcraft player Unwelcome suffered an accident that permanently robbed him of his hearing. Feeling alienated and shunned by his real life friends, he returned to World of Warcraft for some online alienation and shunning.
The loss of one’s hearing is a tragic and traumatic event, but it doesn’t necessarily mean an end to gaming. Many popular games offer subtitle options for the hearing impaired. World of Warcraft itself is quite deaf-friendly on a basic level, overflowing with text-filled quests that don’t require aural cues to complete.
It gets a bit more complicated when you’re in a raiding guild, however. Unwelcome found himself living up to his name when he recently returned to his raiding guild of four years. He detailed his experience in a post on the World of Warcraft forums.
So i came back to wow. Now I’ve been playing with my guild for about 4 years. We have all become close friends. We have even done some rl guild parties. I explained why i have been off for so long to the guild. I explained my condition. Everyone was pretty supportive for about 5 minutes.
Do you know what the first question i got from my guild leader was? He asked me if i could still use (popular voice chat program) vent (Ventrilo). I told him no, but tried to assure him it wouldn’t be a problem as i usually research the fights beforehand and use dbm.
He tells me that i can’t raid unless i have vent. Guild rules and all. I was pissed. After a huge blow out between us i get removed from the guild and put on ignore.
Read the original article in full on Kotaku.
yourhearingaidknow 