Hearing Informed

I recently visited my audiologist here in San Francisco to meet with him and a representative audiologist from Widex to try out a brand new hearing aid- the Widex Passion. The representative was there to fit and adjust the new hearing aid and see how I responded to a unique concept called the audibility extender. The audibility extender brings the higher frequency sounds that are unavailable to me down to a lower octave that I can hear. It was amazing!

Its certainly a bewildering experience to have new sounds available that I’ve never heard before- and its not without a certain “unnaturalness” and strange sound artifacts. These are the inevitable consequence of tinkering with sound in this way. However, I found the new sounds to be something that I really want. For instance- I can barely differentiate between “sh”, “th”, “ch”, and “s” sounds. The audibility extender brought those particular sounds into a range that my hearing aid could amplify for me- at a lower octave. I could understand speech better as a result…truly amazing and I hope they keep this technology and continue to improve on it. It really clicks with me.

This concept won’t work for everyone. Some people find that the audibility extender makes speech harder to understand and find the strange sounds to be unacceptable. But I think if people stuck with this for a while and went through the training provided on a compact disc- they might find that these strange and foreign sounds become more useful over time. It really requires some work and flexibility. I told the Widex representative that it wasn’t unlike being on a hallucinogenic drug- where the brain has to grasp onto brand new sounds that it’s never dealt with before. I think the brain should be given some credit..built with a huge amount of flexibility it can deal with these new sounds over time and adapt to them. Im confident that the audibility extender will prove to be a more and more useful and positive experience for me over time. I’ll report back on this as I move along with it.

The audibility extender needs to be fined tuned and adjusted for each user. It helps to have someone tinker with the settings and get them right- otherwise the experience won’t live up to its full potential.

Some areas that I’m excited to use the audibility extender in: listening to bird songs, playing the higher notes on my guitar, the high pitched whirring noises that my transmission is apparently making, whispers, overhearing gossip.

This is a deal breaker for me- I might go with the Widex Passion hearing aids over all other hearing aids simply because of this feature. As a quick disclaimer: Please take my opinion with a grain of salt- what works for one person may not work for another. I’d like to hear from other people what they experienced when they tried this feature- both negative and positive!

As a quick sidenote: For my hearing loss, I felt that the Lyric hearing aid was even better than the Widex Passion in terms of sound quality and making high frequency sounds audible for me. Having said that- I find the Widex Passion to be a close second. I’m not going to wear the Lyric because it won’t work for my ear canal. I’ll write more on that later.

Heres an example of a negative reaction that I found at hohadvocates.org forum

Heres an article and a review of a clinical study of the audibility extender from The Hearing Journal

Another more technical article about frequency transpositioning in general

I’ve been wearing Resound Canta 7 hearing aids for three years now and I have nothing but praise to give them. However, I am in the market to check out the latest technology available in digital hearing aids and I’ll be trying out many different brands. Its usually an obsessive and vapid practice to check on the latest technology when it comes to computers, cameras, ipods, e.t.c. Its often the case that one can be perfectly satisfied with a first generation ipod or a tv that’s several years older. Steve Jobs would tell us otherwise. When it comes to hearing technology I feel differently- because they provide such a massive quality of life difference – I try the newest thing every three or so years to see if a tangible difference can be made with the “ latest cutting edge, smartest hearing aid ever!”.

There are several new (at-least in their honed conception) concepts that I’m very excited to try. One of those is called “transpositioning”. That’s a mouthful for those who don’t speak in esoteric scientific tongues. The gist of it: the hearing aid can take the higher frequencies, those that I don’t hear as well as lower ones, and shift them down an octave so that they are available to me.

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Got your attention? Kathryn Hill, based out of San Francisco, runs a great deaf blog called Stone Deaf Pilots–In a post from a while ago she mentions a deaf owned porn company, DeafBunny. They found a hole in the pornography industry and they aim to fill it. The movies feature deaf actors that communicate with each other in American Sign Language. All the movies come with subtitles. They have one movie so far: Naughty Deaf Roomates.

Ive recently tried a pair of Able Planet NC1000CH Clear Harmony headphones and here is my verdict: excellent noise reduction without excessively tainted sound, rich tones, comfortable, quite expensive.

I agree with CNETs review that there is no real incentive for customers to shell out 300 dollars for these headphones instead of the better known Bose Quiet Comfort Series. Bose has a longer track record that people are familiar with.

However, I will purchase the Able Planets headphones because I am familiar with their other products. I believe in their patented Linx technology. These headphones are incredible and in my opinion- slightly better than the Bose headphones.

Other Advantages to the Clear Harmony over Bose Quiet Comfort? :

1. Even with the noise cancellation switched off (or if the two AAA batteries that power it are removed), the Clear Harmony headphones still can be used to play music (unlike the Bose Quiet Comfort 2 and Quiet Comfort 3, which need to be powered to work).

2. Clear Harmony is built to work with hearing aids- not electromagnetic interference.

Bose has a longer running track record so it’s going to make sense for most people to buy those instead. But if you get a chance to try these- Do check them out and consider them against the Bose. Especially if you are hearing impaired and wear hearing aids.

A new watch concept from designer Nikita Golovlev gives a visible warning to hearing-impaired users if something dangerous is going on nearby. Dubbed Alarme, the watch is imbedded with omnidirectional microphones that “listen” for audible warnings such as a fire alarm. The alert is given visually and through vibrations. The processing power for such a device would be potentially gargantuan- but this watch combines function and design in an aesthetically pleasing package.

If you have a high frequency hearing loss (the most common kind) - then you aren’t likely to hear a thing coming out of the alarm clock of your digital watch. Alarm clocks beside the bed are a different matter- you can usually adjust the volume and have it set to a cacophonous radio station.

Before a trip that I made to Peru I did a search on the internet: “watches for the hearing impaired”. I came up with a couple places and I decided to try a watch called the VibraLight 3. This watch has a vibrating alarm clock that jolts your wrist and you awake. This seemed like just the right watch and it came in a number of nifty colors and styles reminiscent of my classic Casio.

The watch turned out to be an utter failure.

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God in his wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.

-Ogden Nash

Ormia ochracea between two hearing aids

An interesting journal article was published in Nature (April 2001) concerning a study done on a particular fly’s amazing sense of directional hearing.

Whereas most flies have no sense of hearing whatsoever, the parasitic fly Ormia ochracea enjoys an excellent sense of directional hearing. Humans have a highly evolved directional hearing sense which is aided by the fact that our ears are up to six inches apart. The Ormia’s ears are just a half millimeter apart but it has directional hearing that rivals ours through a uniquely evolved system.

side note: while most sounds can be distinguished quite well with one ear alone, the task of pinpointing where sounds are coming from in space requires a complex process called binaural fusion, in which the brain must compare information received from each ear, then translate subtle differences into a unified perception of a single sound—say a dog’s bark—coming from a particular location.

Through an elaborate experiment, researches discovered that the Ormia could listen to a cricket sound and discern its location down to the nearest 1 or 2 degrees! They note that “even humans trying to detect who is speaking in a crowded room can’t do better than that”.

That Ormia has managed to develop such a sophisticated sense of hearing despite its miniscule size leads the researchers to hope that they may learn from this fly and create ever more powerful yet tiny hearing aids.

Other studies concerning this parastic fly and it’s exceptional hearing can be found at..

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The award of opulence goes to this diamond encrusted, solid 24k gold hearing aid and remote. If you have 50,000 dollars to throw around and the vanity to boot, go ahead and buy this. Be seen with your bling bling hearing aid and bling H20- the trendy new bottle of water seen throughout Hollywood. Only Flavor Flav could sport this kind of hearing aid with style.

Those of us that make up the poorer lot will spend a measly 6,000 dollars for a pair of digital hearing aids. The proprietor of this hearing aid, Widex, does make some great hearing aids. This particular model is a BTE (behind-the-ear) hearing aid that is powerful enough for “open fittings” - a nice feature because it lets in more natural sound and sounds less occluded. Occlusion is the tech-speak for “sounds like your talking inside of an echoing barrel”. The real reason open fittings are popular: baby boomers love how invisible they are.

I can imagine the cash drenched oaf showing the ladies his diamond adorned hearing aid- and maybe, at the end of the night, he can take them to this gravity defying magnetic floating bed (no joke).

Scientists from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT have developed a flexible battery made of carbon nanotubes and plain old paper. This battery holds a fair amount of power: 110Mah/g and is capable of powering a small fan.

A flexible battery like this could bode well for future hearing aid designs. I’ve found that the battery compartment on my hearing aid is one of the weakest links - the most likely to break and a size constraint. These batteries wouldn’t require as much material sandwiched around them.

While the narcissistic fixation on making hearing aids invisible seems overdone sometimes, I would still love to see the BTE hearing aids I wear get a little smaller while still being powerful enough to allow open air fixings (essentially a hearing aid with no mold in my ear) for my type of hearing loss. A flexible battery could potentially allow an “open-air” and flexible design such as this one- the wire ear:

The wire ear design has a lot of potential. The new form enhances usability and addresses a number of technical problems. The microphone is located in front of the ear, maximizing the opportunity of sound capture. The speaker is placed within the ear canal to reduce acoustic error resulting in improved sound quality and effectively decreasing the ‘echo’ sensation experienced when the close proximity of the speaker to the eardrum gives the sound a natural boost in volume. Another benefit of the distance between these elements is the reduction in auditory feedback. A flexible battery would fit well with this flexible design.

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I don’t know who to give credit to exactly (maybe director Michael Gondrey or writer Charlie Kaufman?)- but the movie Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind sports some of the most cutting edge and impressive captions I have ever seen. The subtitles are in a feature rich English SDH format. Check them out for yourself. Captions are usually a run of the mill affair- they take the script and print it out on the bottom of the screen in block letters. But this movie does them differently…

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