There’s one thing that people could say about my hearing loss that does get to me but in general I try not to stay calm when I get into a situation because I didn’t hear something.

Sometimes I get that look and I feel like an idiot, sometimes I get frustrated because someone will not make themselves heard, sometimes I get nervous because I’ve lost the conversation and if someone asks me something I won’t have a clue what to say and will have to admit that in front of the group. Many times I’ve given someone the wrong impression that I’ve ignored them.

But I always try and give the person the benefit of the doubt. It’s not easy to know how to act around someone with a hearing loss or some other kind of disability.

I’d be the same if I saw someone in a wheel chair struggling to get into a shop. I don’t know anyone in a wheel chair so I don’t have first hand experience of how to behave around them. Do they want me to push their chair into the shop? Should I just treat them the same as the other customers? Do I get a shop assistant to help them? I don’t know. Would they be offended if I asked them if they needed help?

So it’s the same with the people who refuse to speak up – maybe they are shy of talking louder. And the people who SHOUT when you ask them to repeat what they said – they’re probably just trying to be helpful.  Would you like them to write it down for you? What that offend you?

People just don’t know how to react to people they don’t understand. Go easy on them.

Bumped into someone yesterday and had a brief chat. Well, they had a brief chat, I had nothing; it was without a doubt the dumbest conversation I’ve ever had, I feel like an idiot.

They opened the conversation with a couple of sentences, I couldn’t understand a word of it. The obvious thing to do was to tell them I didn’t hear them, so why didn’t I? I guess I was thinking, “I might be able to pick up a few words and work out what they are going on about“. I didn’t.

They talked a bit more, their mannerisms suggested they weren’t asking a question so I just nodded and smiled. Still no idea what they are talking about and now I have a problem: they’ve been talking for enough time for it to be very awkward for me to say, “uhh… sorry, I haven’t heard a word you said for the last 5 minutes”.

In the end I started just saying some stuff myself, could’ve been relevant but I very much doubt it. I did pick up one of their questions at the end of the conversation and answered that but in a 5 or 6 minute conversation I head about 4 words and never told them, I just tried to bluff it.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Think I learnt an important lesson: If I can’t hear or understand the first sentence someone says then it is unlikely that I am going to be able to hear anything they say after that. People normally have their own comfortable speaking volume and style and they aren’t going to suddenly change after one sentence. If I don’t hear straight away I need to tell them and not get myself into that situation again.

What do you do? Do you mention you can’t hear straight away or let yourself get into a sticky situation?

This is from a Sonitus Medical press release.

Sonitus Medical Inc, developers of SoundBite, a nonsurgical and removable hearing device to transmit sound via the teeth and bone, has announced the publication of the first peer-reviewed article on its hearing system. “Preliminary Evaluation of a Novel Bone-Conduction Device for Single-Sided Deafness,” has been published in the most recent issue (31:492-497, 2010) of the Otology & Neurotology professional journal.

“The data presented in this initial publication shaped the development of our nonsurgical bone-conduction device,” said Amir Abolfathi, CEO of Sonitus Medical, in a statement. “It laid the groundwork necessary to complete our SoundBite hearing system, which has since been investigated in a clinical trial whose findings have been submitted to the FDA. As part of our sustained commitment to generate good clinical data, we look forward to sharing our clinical trial results in a future publication.”

Gerald R. Popelka, PhD, professor of otolaryngology and chief of the Division of Audiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, Calif, is the article’s lead author. Popelka, who serves on the company’s scientific advisory board, and his coauthors, reported on key measurements of the hearing system related to oral function and oral health, calibration, auditory performance, speech intelligibility, and overall comfort.

You can read it on the Sonitus website, via Hearing Review.

I’ve been wearing a pair of Starkey’s new S Series hearing aids for about a month now. I have the in-the-canal (ITC) model. On Starkey’s website they list the S Series’ main features. I’ve written a bit below about how each feature is working for me.

PureWave Feedback Eliminator

I have not had a single squeak of feedback. The feedback-elimination program was run when I had the aids fitted and they’ve been perfect since.

Acoustic Scene Analyzer

Speech is definitely clearer and easier to understand with the S Series. Voices are not so deep sounding and are less muffled. I quite often walk along next to a busy road during the day and the noise of the cars passing used to muffle the voices of the people I walk with – the S Series helps a lot to reduce the road noise and keep the focus on the voices.

T²

I’ve written before about this feature, I think it’s a great idea. I don’t have it set up at the moment as I do not have a touch-tone mobile phone. The standard S Series gives your audiologist the ability to switch between T² or volume control via an on-the-shell knob – it is possible to have both the T² and volume-control option together but you need to ask for it before the aids are sent to Starkey for building.

InVision Directionality

The thing that most impresses me about the S Series is that I am can now localise sound much easier – i.e. I now know where voices are coming from! Meetings at work which had more than 4 or 5 people in used to be a nightmare for me because I could hear that someone had spoken and in most cases hear what they said but often I wasn’t able to quickly work out who said it because I didn’t know which direction the voice was coming from. The S Series has really helped to pinpoint voices for me – I’ve really noticed a difference, especially when more than one person is talking at once.

AudioScape

The noise reduction is good. This is really the first time I have used noise reduction so I don’t have anything to compare it against. As I’ve said before, road noise is now reduced but voice clarity remains – it’s easier to hear people when I’m travelling in the car with them. The noise reduction is sometimes noticeable when it changes, it is not a always completely seamless thing – if there’s a noise then it’s loud for a second and then your hear it reduce when the reduction kicks in. Having said that, I don’t find the noticeable reduction a problem and it’s not that often that it occurs.

Wind noise is still a problem for me. Not as bad as it used to be but I still have a problem understanding people in strongish winds.

Intuitive Features

The inbuilt indicators do a good job – most of them feature a voice rather than just a beep. You get someone in your ear telling you that your battery is low. Your audiologist can also program them to tell you when they are due for a service or you are due for a checkup, which is an easy way to remember. As you turn up the volume there’s a beep to let you know that you’ve gone up to the audiologist’s recommended volume setting, a good way to avoid over-amplification. You get a voice telling you which programme you have selected when you switch.

Last but not least the S Series has a self check feature – if you open and close the battery door 3 times the aid will self test and then tell you whether it is working correctly or not.

Automatic Telephone Response

There is a telephone programme that the aids switch to as you put the phone to your ear. I have found that voices are now clearer and a bit easier to hear with the S Series but I do still struggle, but considering the extent of my hearing loss this isn’t surprising.

Music & Television Processing

Can’t say I’ve noticed any major difference when watching TV or listening to music.

Overview

I’ve been really pleased with my S Series, they help me to hear better in a number of different situations. I haven’t tested them on different programmes yet, I always use the default setting – next time I’m at a party or a pub I’ll try out the programmer for that. I really want to try out the T² feature as well. I’m going to write another article about other things I’ve noticed with the S Series but here I wanted to try and give a user’s perspective on whether Starkey’s buzzword feature list make a difference – they do.

Starkey have recently introduced touch controls to their S Series hearing aids, a feature they are calling Sweep.

The BTE S Series models have a touch-sensitive area that takes up most of the top side of the shell. You can use this control to either change volume or switch between programs. By default, an up or down motion increases/decreases the volume and a tap changes the program – but this can be configured differently if you want.

I already like the S Series’ T² feature for allowing you to control them via a mobile phone and Sweep is another nice feature that makes the S Series easy to use.

The iPod Touch and the iPhone have an app for everything it seems. There’s apps for using Twitter, tracking stocks, playing games, creating new recipes and making sure you don’t burn them, learning French, the list goes on and on.

When is someone going to build a hearing aid app?

An app that turns an iPod into a fully-functioning hearing aid, it isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. The iPhone already has everything it needs: a microphone, two outputs and the ability to run software for sound processing. The iPod has all that except the microphone but I’m sure someone could build a cheap add-on. Are there wireless headphone for the iPod? That’d be even better.

This setup would make for a cheap assistive listening device. It would also be a poweful one as it could run the high-end software that is in today’s cutting edge hearing aids. I could imagine a day where all of the big-name manufacturers have their hearing-aid software available on the app store for download so you could pick and choose for a couple of dollars for each hearing aid.

All those people blasting their eardrums with their iPods could have the solution to their impending hearing loss without having to buy extra hardware!

Hearing aids are expensive and when you’ve spent a lot of money on a pair you expect them to fix your hearing problems. After all, that’s what they are for, to correct your hearing loss.

I remember (it’s probably about five years ago now) visiting an audiologist because I was struggling to hear at work and wanted to replace my pair of aging hearing aids. I didn’t really have a lot of money to splash on new aids but I knew I needed to do something to hear better. After having my hearing tested we talked about a couple of different aids that could be suitable and I couldn’t decide whether to go for the pair at £1500 or for the more expensive ones and I said something like, “I just need to hear everything at work”, to which the response was, “You need to have a realistic expectation of how well you are going to hear with these aids – you’ve got a pretty severe hearing loss”. I was pretty annoyed with that: I have to pay you £1500+ and have realistic expectations? Sounded like a cop-out to me.

But the audiologist was 100% right.

Hearing aids do an excellent job of modifying sounds so that they are audible but they can’t repair a damaged ear. For us with hearing loss the clarity of sounds is just as big a problem as the volume of them – you might hear stuff but you don’t understand it. This is especially true with sensorineural hearing loss, which is the most common type of loss

It can be incredibly frustrating to spend money only to find that you still can’t hear some stuff that you want to. I am writing this because I get a lot of emails from people who are frustrated with their new aids and their audiologist and whilst it pains me to say it we really do have to have realistic expectations of what a hearing aid can do. Which is not to say that I think hearing aids are rubbish or anything like that – my hearing aids mean that I go from not being able to hear someone talking even if their mouth is right next to my ear to being able to hold conversations at short distances. They make a world of difference to me but there’s still stuff I can’t hear every day and that is frustrating.

A soldier has won £330,000 from the Ministry of Defence for hearing loss, after being told not to wear earplugs during a training exercise to make it more “battle realistic”. Charles Bradlaugh was left with hearing loss and tinnitus.

Mr Bradlaugh, 22, was a cadet when colleagues started firing before he could find earplugs or alert anyone at Barry Buddon Training Centre in Carnoustie, Angus, in 2004.

He was given a discharge from the army on health grounds in 2007. Mr Bradlaugh, of Sunderland, had sued the MoD for breach of statutory duty saying his condition left him “disadvantaged in the labour market”. The MoD admitted liability.

At Newcastle county court yesterday he was compensated for loss of earnings and damages. Judge Christopher Walton said: “I’m satisfied it was his intention to continue in this career for 22 years.”

Story originally seen on The Deaf Blog.

It is much harder to fit hearing aids to someone who has a severe hearing loss than to someone who has only a minor loss.

Seems logical, right?

Turns out that a lot of the time it isn’t like that, it’s just as hard, or even harder, to fit a hearing aid to someone who has lost only a small amount of hearing as it is to someone who can hardly hear a thing. The reason is that the person with the minor loss is chasing after the perfect hearing they had a few years ago, or at least what they remember as perfect – whereas the person with a severe loss probably just wants a comfortable sound and to be able to hear people talking.

Why would it be hard to set up a hearing aid for a minor loss so that someone can get back their glory days and hear exactly as they want? They’ve had their hearing test, the audiogram has been created and the aids have been programmed to it. Bingo, perfect sounds are here again.

Or not!

Hearing is very subjective, two people with exactly the same hearing loss, exactly the same hearing test results and exactly the same audiogram will probably not want their hearing aids set up in the same way. The dispenser can set the hearing aids to fit the hearing loss, but only the person listening with them knows how something should sound.

The Starkey S Series hearing aids have a feature called T2. This basically enables you to control the hearing aid with a touch-tone mobile phone.

Once your audiologist has switched your aids to use the T2 feature it is easy to use your mobile to change volume and programme settings – you just need to hold the phone a few inches from your ear, press the * button twice and then use the keypad to increase/decrease volume or change programme.

I really like this for two reasons:

• It means you don’t have to have a volume control or programme selector button on your aid’s shell. This is particularly useful if you are going for the ITE, ITC or CIC models as they have less surface space showing to house the buttons.
• It’s more discreet. You don’t have to stick your finger in your ear and waggle it around whenever you need more volume or a different programme.