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A few people were mightily disturbed by the funny video of Blendtec founder Tom Dickson grinding up a bunch of hearing aids in his company's high-tech blender. But at least one reader went beyond complaining and made the helpful suggestion to donate them to someone who needs them. The Lions Club will do it for you. I'm always up for a good laugh, and those "Will it Blend" videos are very well done. And compared to the tens of millions of dollars' worth of hearing aids sitting unsed in people's drawers, the waste of a few aids in Tom's blender seems like small change to me. If anything, I hope it's raised awareness of the problem of unused hearing aids and help encourage people to do two things: one, try new aids if the old ones didn't work the first time, because technology has gotten so much better; and two, do something useful with those unused aids--recycle them. The Lions Club International has been involved with hearing-loss issues since the days of Helen Keller and has a great recycling program. You can donate your aids at a number of the Lions Club centers around the country and rest assured they will be recyled for use by someone who otherwise couldn't afford them. It's a great program and worth your support. So, if you or a relative have some old hearing aids of your own sitting in the drawer, don't blend them, recycle them.
My blogger friend Dr. Tom Goyne has several interesting posts with links to videos that Phonak, Widex, Oticon and other major hearing-aid companies are putting on the web. Great, but....Why aren't any of the hearing-aid manufacturers' videos captioned?!??! Some of the videos are really slick productions. Like Tom, I applaud their efforts to reach out directly to consumers to erase the old stigma of hearing aids and educate people about the new technologies that make hearing aids so much better than they used to be. (They are the next step in the consumer marketing trend kicked into high gear last year by Phonak, which blitzed the fashion world with its high-glam Audeo ads.) How ironic, and what a disappointment, then, to find that none of the videos are captioned. I really would love to see what that earnest Widex customer has to say in her testimonial.
Smaller manufacturers still can be forgiven for not captioning their videos, because it’s still a little difficult and expensive to integrate captioning with your homemade YouTube videos. But when you’re spending tens of thousands of dollars on a slickly produced video ad, you can’t be forgiven for not bothering to have the ad agency put captions on the video. And soon, there will be no excuse whatsoever. Tayler Mayer, who runs the Deaf Read aggregator site, has a great blog post on how Google now lets you search for captioned videos on YouTube and anywhere else on the web, specifying “search only closed captioned videos.” He also gives a link to a download on do-it-yourself captions for your homemade videos. (Bragging note: my multimedia guru, Dave Counts, designed my Aquarius Advisers website three years ago with captioned videos. He was among the first to figure out how to caption flash videos for the web.) Isn't it time the hearing-aid manufacturers got on the captioning bandwagon?
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Are you tired of seeing your father’s hearing aids sitting unused in the drawer? Do you want to send him a message he won’t forget? Visit one of the funniest web sites I've seen recently. It's called "Will it Blend?" hosted by Blendtec, the commercial blender company, which created an internet sensation with its YouTube video showing an industrial-strength blender grinding an Apple iPhone to dust. The iPhone video has been viewed four million times and counting. Now click here for Blendtec founder Tom Dickson’s hilarious video of someone who looks like your father donating multiple pairs of hearing aids for the same treatment. The video is a hoot, but the old guy who has tossed his last hearing aid into the blender gets the last laugh when he says “That’s the quietest blender I ever heard!”
I recently got a new pair of hearing aids, and I'm as excited as if I'd just bought a new sports car. One of the reasons I'm so happy is that I was able to take ownership of the process for the first time by getting them from America Hears, Inc., which sells and supports hearing-aid consumers directly over the internet. I still love my audiologist, but I'm always looking for something new, and America Hears not only offered a new product but also an entirely new way of getting hearing assistance. I ordered exactly what I wanted, got a set of aids in the mail programmed to my audiogram, and then I was able to make adjustments using software they gave me for my PC with the help of the America Hears audiologist at the other end of the phone. Because the company manufactures and sells direct to consumers, their hearing aids are much less expensive than other premium brands. My expectation was that I'd get a serviceable product, but without the bells and whistles of my high-end Widex hearing aids. However, I was stunned when America Hears sent me full-function, premium digital products that provided me with a much better hearing experience in every way. Here's the short story, though I will write more about it in future posts. To get an America Hears hearing aid, all you have to do is fax the company a copy of a recent audiogram. They build a fully digital product, and their staff audiologists program it exactly to your specifications. They ship it to you along with software and a simple programmer you can use with your PC to adjust your hearing aids further. Because they sell and support direct without any middlemen, they are very affordable, charging only $995 per hearing aid. That's less than half what other makers of premium-brand hearing aids charge. They charge the same price for any of their models, wihch range from new open-fit speaker-in-the-ear products to traditional behind-the-ear models to numerous in-the-ear designs.
]]> Unlike low-cost mail-order resellers, America Hears manufactures its own premium digital hearing aids and supports its customers with its own staff of audiologists. So when you see an ad and call their 800 number or email them, you get a response from a trained audiologist, not a salesperson. They immediately engage you in a lengthy discussion about your hearing needs and help you choose a design that should work for you. You don't have to worry they are guiding you to a more expensive model, because all their hearing aids are priced at the same $995. Then they build the hearing aid using top-quality digital chips and sound processing software from Dynamic Hearing in Australia. They ship it to you with the programming kit that includes software for your PC. Then they continue to support you over the phone, helping you learn to use the software yourself and downloading adjustments you may need after getting used to the new hearing aids. They also offer a 60-day money-back guarantee if you're not completely satisfied.I had thought I couldn't wear in-the-ear aids any more because of my severe hearing loss. When I had a mild loss I wore completely in-the-canal (CIC) hearing aids and was pretty happy with them, though they were a little uncomfortable and feedback was always a problem. So I'd take them out for a "rest" after a few hours of wear. But when I suffered a sudden severe loss in 2002, I moved to behind-the-ear (BTE) aids. These were more powerful but more comfortable because I got a good fit with soft earmolds, and though feedback was still a bit of a problem with my bad left ear where I needed a lot of amplification, I wore them all day long.
America Hears, though, fit me with with in-the-ear (ITE) hearing aids. They are not completely in the canal, but they are not the huge full-size ITEs that I've always found cosmetically unappealing. When I put them in, the fit was very good. More important, there was an immediate improvement in my hearing over my previous hearing aids. I could hear speech better in noise, the directional microphones seemed to be more finely tuned, so background noises were less prominent, and noise suppression at high volume was much better so I no longer had to turn them off to avoid hearing damage when at a ball game or walking on the noisy streets of New York City. And feedback simply wasn't a problem. The feedback cancellation algorithms in their software must be awesome.
All in all, the hearing experience has been amazing--premium quality digital sound and a much better hearing experience from a product priced at less than half my previous brand, and a third the price of the most expensive premium brands. Once I put them in, I didn't take them out. I wear them 18 hours a day.
To get these benefits you have to do some of the work yourself, learning how to use the programmer and working over the phone with the America Hears audiologists. But I've found that to be a benefit, as I can get adjustments any time I want with downloads from America Hears, or even by using the programming software myself to make slight adjustments, rather than waiting until I can get an appointment with my audiologist, getting to the office, etc. So once you get comfortable plugging your hearing aids into the programming software and working out your issues over the phone with your America Hears audiologist, you get the same benefits as you did in the past with a lot less logistical hassle.
I've got a lot more to write about America Hears hearing aids. One, I made my own earmold impressions using a kit they sent me. I got an excellent fit and want to write a separate post about the experience using "the blue goop" that you pour in your ear to take the impression. (It was a lot easier than I thought it would be!) Two, I want to write about the programming software they send you, which as far as I can tell is as full-featured as the software your audiologist uses. Three, I want to write about their business model, which not only depends on selling and supporting their customers over the internet, but also utilizes standard chips and software available from leading vendors who specialize in those products, much as the personal computer industry was able to continue lowering costs by standardizing on Intel chips and Microsoft operating software.
Full disclosure: since I started wearing the America Hears hearing aids, I have started doing some consulting work for the company, whcih I intend to continue. I'm doing it through my "day job" as principal of Aquarius Advisers LLC. America Hears will also sponsor ads on my site, once I set up display ads in addition to the Google ads I'm running. So I will be writing more about America Hears in addition to all the other topics on coping, issues and technology that I've always written about. I'd love to hear from other America Hears customers who have been through the process.
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In the past few months my day job has picked up to the point where I haven't had a lot of time do write about hearing loss. In fact, I haven't had much time even to think about my hearing loss. That's a pretty amazing fact, given that only several years ago I thought about my hearing loss all the time and never imagined I'd function "normally" again. I've written before about how the brain gradually adapts and compensates for deficiencies, and how amazed I have been at the extent of my ability to function at higher and higher levels as time goes on. It's hard to describe. That's why I love the fact that David Paterson, the new governor of New York State, is demonstrating how and why he is able to do one of the world's most demanding jobs even though he is blind. Stephen Kuusisto, a blind author and educator, wrote an Op-Ed article in the New York Times this week that talks about this coping process very eloquently. It resonates well with anyone who has gone through the process of learning how to work around their hearing loss:I imagine the future governor’s information-gathering skills are supple and inexhaustible. Blind people are invariably creative and resourceful. Obviously we’re good listeners. But what people may not know is that learning to have a keen sense for what others are talking about requires developing an equally sharp curiosity about human beings. When people talk to me, I can’t just listen; I am also compelled to take stock of the person behind the words....That’s perhaps the most important thing for the public to understand about professionals who are blind — we are by nature tireless in acquiring information, and we remember virtually every detail of what we read or hear.
I've found in business and life generally that dealing with a disability sharpens you in every other way. I need to know more going into a meeting and be more comprehensive in my follow-up. I have to think about the story behind the story, and understand on a deeper level who and what I am dealing with than people who can get by on more superficial information by hearing only what they need to, rather than truly listening. I know it's a cliche to say that sometimes adversity brings with it certain gifts, but it's true.
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I just discovered a LiveJournal site called "Hearing-Aid Hacking" which gives great do-it-yourself advice on using assistive listening technologies with hearing aids. It features tips and new technologies from real hearing-aid users, everything from how to work with the direct-audio-input (DAI) connections on your hearings aids (if they have them), to the latest on new Bluetooth technologies (especially for mobile phone users) and on the new bells and whistles that hearing-aid manufacturers seem to constantly announce. Here is the site's mission statement: "For high end users of hearing aids. We're frustrated that we're behind the technology curve and pay huge dollars/pounds/euros for good hearing aids that are unaware of and incompatible with anything resembling recent advances in consumer audio tech. We're willing to blaze our own path because no one will do it for us until they realize there is money in them thar hills." If you are a new or experienced hearing-aid user, there is probably something there for you.
I just picked up Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks, and it is a revelation. Sacks is a physician and neurological specialist who has written extensively on previously unexplained phenomena with the brain. His book Awakenings, about coma patients who were administered a drug and awakened, returning briefly to normal lives, only to tragically lapse back into their comas when the drugs wore off, was made into a major motion picture with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams in 1990. Musicophilia is a big book about how the brain assimilates, creates, and otherwise processes music. Because of Sacks’s passion for understanding how the brain interacts with the physical world, it has a lot of information on how the brain works with the hearing organs to process sound and interpret what we hear. Most exciting to me, it hints at some of the reasons why I’ve experienced a marked improvement over the past several years in my ability to hear -- not music, which is still gone completely for me, but to hear and understand people’s voices – even when my physical hearing tests have shown no improvement and even slight decline in hearing levels in both ears. Sacks is making me wonder whether the amazing human brain actually has the ability to correct and “cure” hearing loss to some degree, even when the physical hearing organs are damaged beyond repair. I’ve experienced something similar, in that when I concentrate really hard I can sometime properly discern a single melody played by a single instrument; often the tone leaps from one octave to another in mid-stream as my brain chooses an octave that my ears can process more or less properly, but I still can recognize the tune. I’d heard of something called “recruitment,” where the brain compensates for dead hearing cells by having adjacent cells tuned for higher or lower frequencies pick up and process the sound. So I can hear musical sounds, but they are a discordant mess because my ears hear them at all the wrong tones. But sometimes, seemingly through an effort of will or extreme concentration, I can hear the correct tones. Sacks explains this by identifying a process where the brain actually re-tunes the hearing cells to pick up and process notes at the proper frequencies:
What might seem a preposterous notion has gained support from recent work demonstrating that there are massive efferent connections (the olivocochlear bundles) going from the brain to the cochlea and thence to the outer hair cells. The outer hair cells serve, among other things, to calibrate or “tune” the inner hair cells, and they have an exclusively efferent nerve supply; they do not transmit nerve impulses to the brain, they get orders from the brain. Thus one has to see the brain and ear as forming a single functioning system, a two-way system, with the ability not only to modify the representation of sounds in the cortex but to modulate the output of the cochlea itself. The power of attention – to pick out a tiny but significant sound in our environment, to home in on a single soft voice in the ambient din of a crowded restaurant - is very remarkable and seems to depend on this ability to modulate cochlear function….
If this is true it may help explain why I’ve felt over the past several years that my hearing has improved, especially my comprehension of conversation. If the brain can command what’s left of the hearing organism to actively assimilate and discern specific kinds of musical sounds, perhaps it can also train the ears to “hear” spoken conversation in ways enabling the brain to understand speech more easily. Sacks describes how intensive work by Jacob the composer resulted in lessening of his amusia, as he worked with music and musicians all day long and actively concentrated on adjusting his tonal perceptions. I work just as hard as Jacob, but in conversational settings, because my work as a communications and media consultant requires I be the best possible listener. I thought for the longest time I was just getting better at speech reading and understanding body language and all the visual cues that help one understand what someone is trying to communicate. But perhaps my brain is also learning how to “order” my cochlea and hearing hair cells to interpret the sounds they do pick up in ways that enable my brain to comprehend speech and understand conversation better than I could when I first went deaf.
This may also hint at why a product like the Neurotone LACE speech-comprehension therapy system actually works. I have gotten through four of the 20 LACE lessons and will have a report on the results in a future post.
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Stone Deaf Pilots has a nice writeup about AT&T Wireless stepping in it when it offered a data-only wireless plan, but only for deaf customers. After complaints from the hearing community about discrimination, AT&T shelved the offer, promising to come back later with a wireless-only plan for everyone. It's crazy AT&T and all the other carriers for that matter don't offer inexpensive data-only plans for everyone. AT&T used to offer a very reasonable data-only plan with a nifty little device called the OGO. But that seems to have disappeared. T-Mobile is the only carrier offering a reasonably priced data-only plan for its Sidekick products. I have a Verizon family plan for the mobile phones and find text messaging useful, but I may actually get a T-Mobile account and Sidekick as well for email, instant messaging, and text messaging because, believe it or not, I think it will be less expensive than getting the data option added to my Verizon Wireless account.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a new warning that cochlear implant patients make sure they get vaccinated against bacterial meningitis, a potentially deadly infection causing inflammation of the meninges, or lining of the brain. Several years ago a meningitis scare nearly halted the miraculous forward march of cochlear implant technology, as researchers struggled to find the cause of a rash of meningitis cases among children who had received implants. It was determined that a small rubber wedge used by surgeons to position the electrodes in the cochlea most likely led to higher incidences of infection, including meningitis. The positioner was only used with Advanced Bionics implants and the company quickly changed its surgical procedure so that the positioner was no longer needed. There still is some risk of meningitis infections, but it can be dramatically alleviated by ensuring patients are fully vaccinated. The FDA issued the new warning after two cochlear implant patients died from infections. Neither was fully vaccinated, and one likely died because of the lack of vaccination, the FDA said. It also noted a survey of cochlear implanted children revealed nearly half did not know whether their children had been fully vaccinated. It is advising healthcare providers to ensure their patients have proper vaccinations.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has ordered makers of the erectile dysfunction drugs Viagra, Cialis and Levitra to post prominent warnings on their labels of the possilbity they may cause sudden hearing loss. The FDA said it has received 29 reports of sudden hearing loss, both with and without accompanying ringing in the ears, vertigo, or dizziness following usage of the drugs. Most cases involved one ear, with either a partial or complete loss of usual hearing. In approximately one third of cases, the event was temporary. "Although no causal relationship has been demonstrated, the strong relationship between the use of these drugs and sudden hearing loss in these cases warrants revisions to the product labeling for this drug class," the FDA said in its release, which was accompanied by an excellent Q&A document. A surprisingly large number of drugs, including many chemotherapy drugs, are otoxic, meaning they can cause sudden hearing loss. The best overview of otoxic drugs I've seen is the book Otoxic Drugs Exposed by Neil Bauman, available on his web site.
There's some GREAT news in the captioning world this week from the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at WGBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston. AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to collaborate with NCAM to establish and manage a new International Captioning Forum to set standards for captioning on any kind of video presented on the Web. This critical mass of industry leaders provides real hope that captioning on the Web will one day be as common as closed-captioning on TV, which is now required in the U.S. by the Federal Communications Commission. It follows other recent positive developments, including Apple making its Quicktime video player caption-friendly, and NBC making a bold decision to invest in captioning for all its prime-time shows that are streamed over the web. It's yet another breakthrough move by NCAM and WGBH, which have led the way in not only advocating for accessible media in all forms -- whether it be captioning on TV or in the movies, or audio description technology for blind moviegoers, or the booming video-on-the Web medium -- but also in actually making it happen.