Face Mask Removal May Cause Lost Hearing Aids

From Pacific Hearing Service (with offices in Menlo Park and Los Altos, California), which is the winner of the 2019 Leo Doerfler Award from the Academy of Doctors of Audiology, comes this advice.

  •  Be extra mindful when putting your mask on and taking it off.
  •  Immediately check that both hearing aids are in place after putting your mask on or taking it off.
  • If your hearing aids are smartphone compatible, make sure you have the correct hearing aid app downloaded so that you can track their location.
  • We recommend changing the location services for the hearing aid app to “Always” so it will always track your location whether you are using the app or not, if you feel comfortable with those privacy settings.

Closed Captioning is Popular But Can be Biased

For people who are hard of hearing, or who are watching TV in a noisy environment (e.g. a sports bar), closed captioning makes all the difference between enjoying or not enjoying the broadcast. People who are hard of hearing are protected by federal law. Even for people who are not hard of hearing it can make the difference between enjoying and not enjoying what they are seeing on TV, for example dealing with foreign accents or special vocabularies. But according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University, the automated speech recognition systems used by Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Apple make twice as many errors when interpreting black speech as they do when interpreting the same words spoken by whites.

Hearing Health Tips to Avoid the CoronaVirus

The CoronaVirus has turned normal life upside-down. Those of us who spend a considerable portion of our waking hours dealing with hearing aids and hearing issues are constantly concerned about doing things in a fashion that keeps us healthy. The HLAA (Hearing Loss Association of America) has published a list of tips for hearing aid users to maintain healthy hearing

Hearing Aids Are Too Small

Many people who are hard-of-hearing do not have hearing aids. Mostly they are concerned that wearing hearing aids make them look old, so they often choose the smallest model they can find that amplifies sufficiently. Big mistake! Older people typically have trouble dealing with small objects because their fingers are no longer nimble. And many small hearing aids, particularly in-the-ear designs, have control buttons that are difficult or impossible to use. (This problem is mostly solved by well-designed smartphone Apps.) In fact, the best thing that the hard-of-hearing could do is swallow his/her pride and buy a large model so that people speaking with them will be aware of their hearing challenges and speak louder. And they can more easily change batteries and insert/remove the hearing aids. Interestingly, a new company named Neosensory completely does away completely with anything in the ear, using a compact case that can be worn like a wristwatch or put into a pocket.

CoronaVirus Hurts Audiologists but Not Sellers of OTC Hearing Aids

The CoronaVirus affects almost everyone, but it is especially painful for professions like hairdressers and yoga instructors who come into close contact with their patients. Audiologists are similarly affected, and need to proceed carefully. So are their patients, who may need “hands-on” services such as fitting, adjusting, and earwax removal. Buyers of OTC (over the counter) models are better off, because they do not need personal contact. There are somewhat frequent ads for low-priced hearing aids from companies no one has heard of, and are risky purchases. We ourselves have been customers of two products from Sound World Solutions, some years ago it was their CS50+ PSAPs and more recently it was their HD75 hearing aids, which perform very well.

Audiolo-G Ear Drops Maker Runs Afoul of Better Business Bureau

A half-page “PAID ADVERTISEMENT” in my newspaper (The Mercury News (part of the Bay Area News Group)) on March 25, 2020 is headlined “Greek Inventor’s Eardrops Could Make Hearing Aids Obsolete by 2023”.  From an impressive-sounding “Life Sprout Bioceuticals”. At a price of Only $44.95. This was accompanied with eight “reviews” from putative satisfied customers. Decades ago such hucksters were selling snake oil. But these days watchdog Better Business Bureau is wise to these tactics, and has published seven complaints, mostly dealing with the company’s failure to refund customers’ money when they discovered the product doesn’t work.

Most Hearing Aids Are Not Actually Used – Part 2

Why? The folks at Senior Planet, a group of active 60+ people found a bunch of reasons:

1. Hearing Aids Are Too Expensive

2. Hearing Aids Are Unattractive  

3. Hearing Aids Don’t Help   

4. Hearing Aids Are Uncomfortable

5. Hearing Aids Batteries Are Hard to Handle

6. Hearing Aids Are Easy to Lose

7. Hearing Aids Make Me Feel/Look Old

In summary, there are two groups of reasons: the appearance and performance of hearing aids themselves and the difficulty of using and keeping track of them.

There is a school of thought that hearing aids should be large and visible, so that persons conversing with the wearer are well aware of his/her hearing difficulty.

Only Five States Require Insurers to cover Hearing Aids

As of January 1, 2020 Maine became the fifth state to require private health insurers to cover hearing aids.Of the total Maine population of 1,340,000 as of January 2020, about 173,000 had impaired hearing as of 2014. BTW, we personally lost one of our Widex hearing aids in June 2019, and it cost us $600 to replace it. Interestingly, Widex has a “find my hearing aid” capability in its app. We weren’t initially aware of that capability (which has a very fine geographic  resolution, and by the time we used it the hearing aid had been destroyed or moved to an inaccessible location.

Smart Hearing Aids Focus on Person Speaking and Muffle Other Noise

Despite their usual high prices, hearing aids have many imperfections, among them their inability to deal with challenging environments, in particular rooms with predominantly hard surfaces and little or no acoustic designs (acoustic ceiling tiles are pretty much a joke). And hearing tests today are conducting in insulated “closets” so the resulting hearing aid “prescriptions” miss the boat. Fortunately hearing specialists at Stanford University and elsewhere are developing standards based on “Hearing in Noise” or “Sound in Noise” (SIN is easier to remember, no?). And an Israeli company, OrCam, is using artificial intelligence to identify and isolate a person’s voice within a crowd (using lip reading and body gestures) and sending their speech to Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids.