HearUSA, the rapidly growing conglomerator of hearing-aid retail stores across the U.S., has hired Don Shula, the legendary former coach of the National Football League's Miami Dolphins, to promote hearing aids among active Baby Boomers. In its second-quarter financial report, HearUSA cited the costs of the Don Shula "Just Find Out" TV and promotional advertising campaign as one of the reasons it incurred a $3.4 million loss, or $0.09 per share, in its second fiscal quarter. The company has been investing in rapid growth and said it expects to hit more than $100 million in revenues in 2007 as it continues opening and acquiring retail hearing-aid centers. The company also recently announced expanded agreements with leading managed care providers, giving the hearing-aid provider access to a pool of 2.5 million insured patients. Among the providers HearUSA has agreements with is the U.S. Veteran's Administration. That relationship is curious given the fact that the U.S. government usually looks for made-in-America suppliers, whereas 90 percent of the products HearUSA sells comes from Siemens, a German company, according to an announcement HearUSA made in January 2007. Siemens also has a significant financial interest in HearUSA, the company said in the same announcement.
Posted by David on Sep 10, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
NBA Basketball Legend Kevin McHale Supports Cochlear Implants For Kids
By Jake Copithorne
Former Boston Celtics great and current Minnesota Timberwolves General Manager Kevin McHale has recently made news for his 5-for-1 NBA mega-trade, but it’s his 4-for-1 deal that's been turning heads outside the basketball world: four cochlear implants for the cost of one. In partnership with four other board members, McHale has co-founded the Help Me Hear Foundation, an organization dedicated to granting free cochlear implants to impoverished deaf children. He will also act as the foundation's national spokesperson.
The cost of a cochlear implant, including the required surgery, can range from $30,000 to $50,000. The necessary post-op rehabilitation can be equally expensive. But HMH plans to cut that often unaffordable price tag to only $7,000, all paid by tax-deductable donations to the foundation. If McHale could make bargains like that at his day job, the Timberwolves would have made the playoffs!
HMH has the ambitious goal of granting 200 cochlear implants to deaf children by the end of 2008, and then doubling that number in each of the following three years. By 2011, the organization hopes to have provided a total of 1,600 cochlear implants to children in need.
Continue reading "NBA Basketball Legend Kevin McHale Supports Cochlear Implants For Kids" »
Posted by David on Aug 17, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
My Dad's Hearing Loss Is A Challenge Our Family Confronted Together
By Jake Copithorne
"I'm sorry, could you repeat that?" my dad asked for the third time. The line at the bookstore was growing at an alarming pace. Six, seven, eight people were waiting behind us now, more agitated by the minute.
"There is a special today. Since you bought six books, you can get one of these two bags for free. Which--would--you--like?" The last sentence was punctuated with loud, arrogant condescension in each drawn-out word. I could feel my tension rising to the point where my heart raced and my stomach churned. I was angry at the cashier and embarrassed for my dad. The line began to push, and the cashier was rude, impatient, and at the edge of his tolerance level....
It was Dad's first day out of the house after suddenly losing much of his hearing three months before. The doctor said it was probably a combination of Meniere's disease and autoimmune inner ear disease--a stress-related disease in which your immune system mistakes your good hearing cells for being unhealthy and attacks them. The disease often leads to a total loss of hearing. It is not well understood, and there's no known cure.
The loss of Dad's hearing was not only a challenge that he had to overcome, but a challenge for everyone in the family. I was only thirteen at the time, but I quickly started to understand firsthand how the world treats people who have disabilities.
Continue reading "My Dad's Hearing Loss Is A Challenge Our Family Confronted Together" »
Posted by David on Aug 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
Josh Swiller Can Tell You Exactly What It's Like To Be Hard-Of-Hearing
Josh Swiller, who started an excellent blog several years ago about what it's like to get a cochlear implant, wrote a great article for the New York Times Sunday Magazine today that may be the best description I've read of what it's like to be hard-of-hearing. He talks about how as a child people thought he was "slow," until he was diagnosed with hearing loss. Then after he got hearing aids came the frustration of people's expecations that he would be able to communicate normally, instead of at best only getting "the idea of words" or a conversation instead of the real thing:
"With hearing aids, I was expected to hear. But hearing aids amplified every single sound they encountered, including all the background sounds you’d rather they didn’t. All that noise, amplified 90 decibels, was difficult to decipher; voices didn’t produce words so much as the idea of words."
In school, in spite of his excellent speech-reading skills ("I became an assiduous lip-reader, and it turned out that while only about 30 percent of spoken English is recognizable on the lips, virtually 100 percent of televised basketball-coach profanities are...."), he discovers that "'hearing' is a fake smile plastered over a losing struggle with fast-talking kids and crowded room" and in college at Yale University he is stumped by a professor whose beard is so thick it is impossible to read his lips. There's a lot of other great stuff in the article and in his blog. Check them out, and pick up his book, The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, due out next month.
Posted by David on Aug 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
USA Today: How Starkey Founder Bill Austin Does Well By Doing Good
USA Today has published a wonderful profile on Bill Austin, Founder and CEO of the biggest hearing-aid manufacturer in the U.S., Starkey Laboratories. It focuses rightly on the phenomenal degree of philanthropic work he's done, distributing free hearing aids to millions of people in need throughout the world. It also reviews his history as a super salesman of hearing aids, with his biggest breakthrough fitting President Ronald Reagan in 1983. Since then he's fitted four other presidents including G.W. Bush who wears Starkey earplugs while hunting to protect his hearing from gunshot noise. There's also a link to an additional interesting story on why hearing aids are so expensive. It's the most concise summary I've seen of: 1) the hefty R&D costs that have to be amortized across a market of far fewer units than typical consumer electronics products reach; and 2) the lack of insurance reimbursement for hearing aids. Mostly though it's an inspiring story of an all-American entrepreneur and innovator who single-handedly helped build an industry, then used his hard-won riches to help out others around the world.
Posted by David on Aug 11, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)
Apple Should Do More To Help Prevent Hearing Loss Among iPod Users
Ever since Apple was sued by a Louisiana man claiming his iPod caused irreparable hearing loss, I've been scratching my head about vendors' responsibility to prevent hearing loss versus individuals' responsibility to take care of their own health. After all, hadn't Apple already published a warning that playing your iPod too loud could be bad for your hearing? And how is an iPod worse than a typical city street, an airplane cabin, a car, a nightclub, and most work environments, elementary schools and hospitals -- all of which often expose you to more then enough noise to harm your hearing? Then, when Apple provided a volume limit setting for the iPod, it seemed like the company was going above and beyond its obligations to the public. But I finally heard from a knowledgeable source that I trust on the issue, and unfortunately the news isn't good. Dr. Brent Edwards, head of the Starkey Hearing Research Center, says in his Innovation Science blog that "Apple's response provides so little guidance on how to set the limit that it is near useless to concerned parents of children who use iPods or to concerned iPod listeners."
Continue reading "Apple Should Do More To Help Prevent Hearing Loss Among iPod Users" »
Posted by David on Apr 14, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)
Likable "Incredible Hulk" Lou Ferrigno Is A Real-Life Inspiration For Hard-Of-Hearing People
Healthy Hearing has just posted a good interview with hard-of-hearing actor and bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno. Ferrigno first came to fame in Pumping Iron, the 1970s-era documentary on professional bodybuilders, which today is remembered mainly as the vehicle that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger on his long march to Terminator-hood in Hollywood and then to the Governor's mansion in California. He is better remembered now for his role in The Incredible Hulk 1980s TV series. Less well known but perhaps more important in the long run is that Ferrigno has been hard of hearing since infections stole most of his hearing when he was a small child and is now using his celebrity as an inspiring example for people who have to overcome all kinds of challenges.
Continue reading "Likable "Incredible Hulk" Lou Ferrigno Is A Real-Life Inspiration For Hard-Of-Hearing People" »
Posted by David on Dec 9, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Postmodern Man: Michael Chorost's Cochlear-Implant Book, Rebuilt, Is About A Whole Lot More Than Cochlear Implants
You can learn everything you ever wanted to know about cochlear implants, and more, from Michael Chorost's new book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. But even if he is this month's favorite poster boy for cochlear implant maker Advanced Bionics, the book isn't about cochlear implants. And for all his talk about cyborgs and Steve Austen (remember The $6-Million Man?), it isn't a book about humankind's future as a new species dependant upon and controlled by digital computer intelligence either. Rather, it's a meditation on the postmodern pursuit of knowledge and understanding during a global information revolution that has not only made the world a much smaller place but also smashed many of our most deeply held assumptions about reality -- a world where the things we previously thought we knew, about everything from the hard-and-fast "facts" of Newtonian physics to the formerly sacred values and ideals of the Western "classics," are not only being called into question but also demanding immediate answers.
Continue reading "Postmodern Man: Michael Chorost's Cochlear-Implant Book, Rebuilt, Is About A Whole Lot More Than Cochlear Implants" »
Posted by David on Jun 26, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
In Memoriam: Jack Kilby Made Today's Hearing Aids Possible
It's a little-known fact that Jack Kilby, the inventor of the microchip, was also a hearing-aid pioneer. The Texas Instruments engineer and Nobel Prize winner's death yesterday at the age of 81 has spurred a slew of stories about the invention of the integrated circuit and the dawn of the computer age. But Kilby's first job out of college in the 1950s was with the Centralab Division of Globe-Union Corporation in Wisconsin, where as a young engineer interested in "miniaturization," he helped develop what the Smithsonian Institution calls one of "the first consumer products of the electronic age -- the transistor-based hearing aid." Later, he won fame and fortune with his work on the first electronic calculators, on the first thermal printers, and then for his breakthrough proving it was possible to integrate a large number of transistors on a single piece of silicon to create the first semiconductor chips. Kilby shared the honor of "father of the chip" with Robert Noyce of Intel Corporation, who most likely would have shared the Nobel Prize with Kilby had he lived long enough. After they developed the first memory chips, Intel and Texas Instruments raced to develop and commercialize the first microprocessors. Intel took the lead in microprocessors powering personal computers, while TI took the lead in developing the digital signal processors (DSPs) used in many communications devices, including today's digital hearing aids. So in addition to his early work miniaturizing the amplifiers used in the first generation of analog electronic hearing aids, it's fair to say Jack Kilby also helped make possible today's amazing digital hearing aids. May he rest in peace.
Posted by David on Jun 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
California Dreaming About Hearing-Hair Replacement
Let's talk hair-replacement therapy. No, I'm not talking about premature baldness, Rogaine or Hair Club for Men. I'm talking about the 15,000 hair-like cells we have in each cochlea at birth that are responsible for translating sound waves from the ear drum into electrical signals the brain can decode as speech, music, a baby crying and all other sounds. When these cells die due to natural aging processes, trauma, or exposure to too much noise or otoxic drugs, we experience sensorineurial hearing loss, the most common form of hearing impairment. Human cochlear hair cells don't regenerate, but a few years ago scientists discovered that they do in birds. Now stem-cell gene researchers are looking for ways to make the hair grow back in humans, too, which could be a potent cure for the most common form of hearing loss. Last year, California voters approved $3 billion in funding for stem-cell research, bucking the President's go-slow approach and instantly making their state a magnet for the world's best stem-cell researchers. This week, Stanford University scored a huge recruiting coup when it stole from Harvard Dr. Stefan Heller, a world-leading researcher investigating stem-cell enabled regeneration of "hearing hair."
Continue reading "California Dreaming About Hearing-Hair Replacement" »
Posted by David on May 26, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
William Austin is at it Again
The only thing William Austin seems to work at harder than promoting himself is promoting the benefits of hearing aids. But in fact, the two go hand in hand. Over the past 40 years, the founder of Starkey Laboratories, one of the world's seven dominant hearing aid manufacturers, has waged what at times has seemed a one-man war against the stigma of wearing hearing aids. From fitting U.S. presidents with aids (Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton) to starting a foundation that raises more than $1 million a year and has donated more than 120,000 hearing aids to people in need around the world, the name William Austin has become synonymous with hearing health. This month Vanity Fair magazine put him in its Hall of Fame. And today the Starkey Hearing Foundation issued a news release entitled "Legendary Audiologist William Austin Restores Hearing to 113-Year-Old Woman."
A publicity stunt from the P.T. Barnum of the hearing aid industry? Perhaps. But it couldn't be for a better cause. For more information on the Starkey Hearing Foundation, including information on how to contribute, go to http://www.sotheworldmayhear.org.
Continue reading "William Austin is at it Again" »
Posted by David on Apr 25, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
