Italian hearing aid retailer Amplifon is undertaking a major expansion in the UK and a £10m rebranding exercise.

The company currently trades under the Ultratone, SieTech and Hearing Health names, these will be replaced with the single Amplifon brand – the new branding is being handled by the London-based Saatchi group this July.

The company, which is listed on the Milan Stock Exchange, also plans to open an additional 22 stores in the UK, three of which will be in Manchester. They already have 143 shops and 120 day-care centres around the UK.

Enrico Vacca, Amplifon marketing director, said: “This is the biggest investment by any private company in our sector on the UK high street. When people have problems with their ears, we want them to come to us for free advice rather than depending on NHS waiting lists.

Amplifon claims to be the number one private provider of hearing aids in the UK with 23 per cent share of the market and last year had UK sales of £51m last year.

Hearing Aid Market has been up and running for a week now and it has already enabled someone to get a free pair of hearing aids!

Carol kindly offered to donate her late Mother’s hearing aids so that they could be put to use by someone else. On the same day that I received an email from Carol I also got one from Angel in Texas. He was in need of hearing aids. I put the two in touch with each other and I am delighted to say that Carol shipped the aids to Angel, who is now wearing them and having marvellous results!

It is the generosity of Carol and her family that made this possible. A massive thank-you to them.

This is exactly why I set up Hearing Aid Market – to get unused hearing aids to people that need them. Lets hope the site can continue to help other people hear better.

The ASL Video Dictionary and Inflection Guide shows thousands of signs in crisp color video and links them to sentences that demonstrate how they change to convey different meanings. This is critical because unlike English words, ASL signs change – inflect – from sentence to sentence to show different meanings. The sign for help, for example, can change to mean help me, help them, help for a long time, etc. The experts at RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf have developed this innovative dictionary that not only shows you 2,700 signs, but shows most of them in sentences. You can see the inflections and learn how they work to help gain a true understanding of the language of ASL, not just a list of its vocabulary.

This powerful program has many interactive features to help learn and study ASL.

Features

• 2,700 ASL signs and English equivalents
• 2,000 signs linked to at least one of 650 sentences that illustrate how the signs change to show different meanings
• English translations of sentences
• Similar Signs — signs that look alike — are separately grouped for easy comparison
• All signs and sentences performed by Deaf native signers in high quality QuickTime movies
• Various options for viewing the sentences: ASL first, English second; English first, ASL second; both simultaneously; and various default and replay options for order of presentation and signing speed.
• A complete help file to guide you
• An on-line text section that discusses both ASL inflection and ASL sentence structure, with video examples.
• CD version works on both Macintosh and Windows platforms.
• 1,000 signs grouped into 26 categories:

The guide is available on CD or online. The CD costs $50.00 and you can subscribe to the online service for $39.99 per year. Visit their website for more details.

Open fit hearing aids are similar in style to BTE aids in that a shell sits above your ear and a wire travels down from there into your ear canal – but that’s where the similarities end. Open Fit BTEs are much newer technology than traditional BTEs – the shell above the ear is much smaller and the whole aid is lighter.

The open in the name comes from the fact that the earpiece does not fit tightly into your ear canal – as is the case with traditional BTEs, CIC, ITC and ITE models. The earpiece of an open fit hearing aid is a small, soft rubber or silicone cap, which is much more comfortable than the tightly fitting earpieces of BTEs, CICs, etc. The open fitting earpiece helps to reduce the occlusion effect – but can be more susceptible to feedback.

The fitting time for open fit hearing aids will be shorter than other models because the audiologist/aid vendor will not have to take impressions of your ears to create the moulds. It is possible that you could visit an audiologist and walk away with a trial pair of open fits in a single visit whereas you would have to wait a week or more for other models to be delivered from the manufacturer to fit your ear shape.

This type of aid is normally suitable for people with mild or moderate hearing loss.

With a twitch of a muscle, the Chinese concave-eared torrent frog brushes off the sounds of thundering rivers, focusing on the one thing that really matters: the siren song of the opposite sex.

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The males of this rare species are the only animal known to be able to turn a deaf ear to distracting noises while enhancing the calls of their own kind, according to a study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

When the frog is calling for a mate, a piece of cartilage in its eustachian tubes – the canals that connect the ears with the mouth – largely blocks out distracting low-frequency sounds like rushing water. Scientists hope their discovery may lead to improved hearing aids.

“This probably is the only example we know of in the animal kingdom with this unusual adaptation,” said Albert Feng, professor of molecular and integrative physiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a study lead author.

Dr. Feng and his colleagues were measuring how the frog’s unusually thin eardrum responded to different sounds when the eardrum stopped vibrating.

Shining a flashlight into its eustachian tubes, “we saw something, a dark shadow through this transparent eardrum,” he said.

The team found that a muscle in the frog’s head pulls a piece of cartilage and a curtain of tissue into the tube, “almost like an accordion or shower curtain,” Dr. Feng said.

Without its special adaptation, a frog might never hear a mate above the din.

“I’m thinking of making use of some of this mechanism to help us to develop better hearing aids,” which could gracefully handle noisy environments, Dr. Feng said.

From –>Dallas News.

Nokia have announced the release of a new cell-phone accessory designed for users with hearing aids: The Nokia Wireless Loopset works with T-coil equipped hearing aids or cochlear implants, and slips around the user’s neck.

The Wireless Loopset is compatible with Bluetooth-ready handsets, essentially transforming the user’s hearing aid into a headset. The device features adjustable sidetone levels, optimized volume range, single-button calling, and a vibrating alert.

“The Nokia Wireless Loopset provides hearing aid users with a hassle-free and hands-free connection to their mobile phones,” said Nokia R&D Specialist, Peeta Piiparinen,. “Sound is amplified more efficiently, while the distance between the phone and hearing aid means that the possibility of interference is greatly reduced. The loopset filters out background noise, which increases speech discrimination, and offers excellent audio quality in a range of environments such as the car, office, or even in windy conditions outdoors.”

The device is expected to ship the first quarter of next year for 200 euros ($315.36 U.S.).

Krown Manufacturing, a maker of specialty devices for people with poor hearing, was displaying this device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The simple machine has videos of all 4,500 words of the US sign language that can be quickly played back for reference. Krown predicts it will go on sale by the middle of the year.

This story and pic came from Medgadget. A quick browse of the Krown Manufacturing website didn’t give any more details on the machine. The picture of this isn’t great and, to be honest, the machine looks a bit tacky – the blue base and grey keyboard looks like something from an 80’s movie. Hopefully it looks better in the flesh.

Given the availability of broadband nowadays and the rise of video streaming over the net – will people need this?

If you have a moderate to severe (or worse) hearing loss then chances are that as well as struggling to hear speech and other sounds you also struggle with sounds that are too loud for you. I know I sometimes do, doors shutting in our office seem loud to me, running water always sounds a bit too loud as well.

Many times over the years I’ve been in situations where I have had to turn my hearing aids down or move aware from a loud sound while everyone else around me didn’t seem in the slightest bit bothered by it. Turns out that this is a very common problem for those with hearing loss and especially those who wear hearing aids. We really do perceive many loud sounds to be louder than people with normal hearing do.

The reason we perceive some loud sounds to be louder than they really are is because of a thing called recruitment. I’m going to write a separate article about recruitment but basically it occurs as a result of a sensorineural hearing loss and it happens because our brains are trying to compensate for our damaged nerves by using some of the remaining good nerves as well.

The worse your hearing loss is the more likely you are going to suffer from recruitment. If you are having a lot of trouble with noise that is too loud and it’s effecting your ability to hear, or worse, stopping you from wearing your aids, you should speak to an audiologist as all modern hearing aids can be configured to help minimise the loud sounds.

Sometimes I listen to a song and I think, “I’m so lucky that I can still hear that”.

As someone with a hearing loss I spend a lot of time worrying about what I can’t hear. It’s pretty rare that I stop and think about what I can hear.

I thought I’d put this article together just so that I could celebrate some of my favourite songs that I can still hear. I’m not a big listener of music and I never use an mp3 player (too paranoid about further hearing damage) but there are songs that are important to me, that mean something, that define a moment in my life. Songs that I’m thankful I can still hear, here’s a few of them. Feel free to post your own songs in the comments.

I’m looking for a bit of help and advice. Does anyone have any information on getting hearing aids for a 3 year old?

What style of aid works best? Are there any particular manufacturer or brands that are better?

How often will ear moulds have to be changed? Will kids have to have their moulds changed often until their ears stop growing? There seems to be a myth about how long our ears grow for and lots of people say that they never stop, but they stop growing when we’re about 18 or so, right?

Here in the UK, I know of several vendors who will not supply hearing aids to anyone under the age of 16 – where did you get kids’ aids from?

Lots of questions! Thanks to anyone who leaves a comment.