Advocacy
Feel Good Department: Super Bowl Heroes Drew And Brittany Brees Give Big Assist To Hearing Protection Advocacy
Super Bowl MVP Brees Puts Son Baylen's Hearing First
Credit Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees and his wife and partner-in-parenting Brittany with the biggest assist of the year for hearing protection advocacy. The feel-good story of the afternoon was when the future Hall-of-Fame quarterback shared a special moment with his year-old son Baylen just before hoisting the Lombardi trophy in front of 70,000 fans and millions of TV viewers. The first question out of many viewers’ mouths was, “What’s with the headphones?” Drew and Brittany let everyone who asked know that the huge hearing-protection headset covering little Baylen’s ears has been standard issue since their son attended his first game at the tender age of three weeks. The New York Times parenting blog captured the moment beautifully, giving both parents an A+ for putting their son’s precious hearing first. Now here’s a question: who was the manufacturer of that hearing-protection headset? I can’t tell the brand or model from the pictures. Whoever it is now has the world’s most valuable product endorsement!
02/11/2010 UPDATE: This just in–a Hearing Mojo reader named bob has identified Peltor as the maker of Baby Baylen’s hearing-protection headset. Inc. Magazine got on the story quickly. Peltor, located in the home town of the Indianapolis Colts, apparently had no idea their Peltor Junior Earmuffs would be getting such a great endorsement. For more on Peltor see our previous story on Peltor’s hearing protection headsets.
Opinion: Hearing Aid Pricing Should be More Transparent
Hearing Aid Pricing Should Be More Transparent
The recent Consumer Reports survey of hearing-aid pricing and fitting practices highlighted a growing problem for the hearing-aid industry. Increasingly, consumers are starting to wonder why a few small digital components that can be purchased individually from wholesalers for tens of dollars each (digital signal processor, microphone, amplifier and software) end up in a set of hearing aids that can cost thousands of dollars. It’s time for more transparent pricing in the hearing-aid industry. Digital technologies are becoming standardized, and the cost of components continues to decline.
And there are good alternatives to the established brands now for cost-conscious, tech-savvy do-it-yourselfers: America Hears, which builds top-quality digital hearing aids and sells them online, programs them to your audiogram at the factory, sends you the software to make your own adjustments, and has licensed audiologists at the end of the phone to give you as much help as you need. All for under $1,000 a hearing aid. But most other comparable top-quality digital hearing aids still cost two to three times that much. Why? The answer is in the cost of the service required to get a custom fit. If you don’t dare do it yourself, a good audiologist truly is worth his or her weight in gold, especially if your hearing profile is complex. Getting a comfortable fit and programming assistance tuned to your audiogram usually requires multiple tries and is seemingly as much art as science. An audiologist who will stick with you through multiple adjustments is worth a significant mark-up. But it’s fair to question the value of the markup above and beyond the wholesale price of the basic hearing instrument components.
The hearing industry for the most part remains stuck in a very old distribution model which has restricted growth and shut off affordable options for a large segment of potential buyers in need of hearing assistance. Today most hearing aids are sold by audiologists who charge a single price for the hearing instrument and the service they provide. They give you a hearing test and fit you with hearing aids that meet your specific needs. Their invoice most often does not include line items for the cost of the hearing test, for the ear molds, for the hearing instrument, or for follow-up service. If it did, you would see there’s a lot of cost built into the time they put into helping you out. If you don’t need much help, they make a lot of money. If you are a difficult case requiring a lot of adjustments, they make less. This model worked well until recently. But now, digital technologies are making many more options available for people with different kinds of hearing loss. Open-fit designs mean many consumers don’t need an earmold fitting, and good digital amplification is making it possible for many people to get the hearing assistance they need from low-cost manufacturers selling direct, over the counter. One manufacturer, Songbird Hearing, is even offering disposable hearing aids that you can buy direct from their web site to address mild hearing loss, without a hearing test if you sign a medical waiver.
The big established manufacturers hate the idea of hearing aids being sold over the internet or over the counter. They would like to protect a business model that protects high margins for increasingly low-cost technologies by restricting availability to the audiology channel. That way they can maintain quality control and customer satisfaction by ensuring customers get the right product, the right programming and a good fit. They also need healthy gross profit margins to fund research on new technology, especially better software for digital sound processing. But unfortunately that business model also keeps prices high and hearing assistance out of reach for many consumers who simply can’t afford it. I’m a big believer in the value audiologists provide as part of the hearing industry supply chain. However, I think they will have to start publishing more detailed pricing for their services as well as for the products they provide. Competition from direct-to-the-consumer vendors will force them to. However, the competition won’t put them out of business, and won’t eliminate the premium end of the market. It’s okay to charge for valuable service, but customers should know what they are paying for.
And have no doubt customers will continue to spend for hearing assistance, especially when the industry makes it easier to buy exactly what you want at affordable prices. As the big established brands and new and established distribution channels offer a broader range of prices, products, services and solutions, the market will start expanding as fast as it should be, given the demographic increase in hearing loss. Everyone will win: the manufacturers, audiologists and other resellers will continue to make money, and, most important, more consumers will hear better.
More Courts Should Provide ‘CART’ Real-Time Video Transcription Services
More Courtrooms Need CART Video Transcription Systems
I was excused from jury duty today after I told the officer at the reception desk that none of their amplification schemes, even the portable listening devices they provide as an accommodation for people with hearing loss, would work for me. I told him I’d be happy to serve if they could provide CART service–communications access real-time transcription–where they wheel a TV monitor into court and provide real-time video captioning of the proceedings. But they still don’t provide that service in the Massachusetts Superior Court House where I was called to serve.
CART systems have been around for many years and have long been recognized by the federal government as a “reasonable accommodation” under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). So it’s disappointing and a little surprising that CART service isn’t yet a standard accommodation for hard-of-hearing people called to jury duty.
Now that it’s been several years since the FCC mandated closed captions on regular TV broadcasts, including live news, and now that nearly all DVD’s from Hollywood come with optional subtitles, I’ve learned how much I’ve been missing when I have to fall back on speech reading and portable amplifiers to supplement my hearing aids. There are many business meetings where I need to struggle along understanding half to three-quarters of what is said. Lucky for me, I have empathetic clients who don’t mind repeating themselves, and my partners take good notes and are patient about filling me in after-the-fact on things I’ve missed. Even then, after a day of struggling to hear, worrying about what I didn’t hear, and working overtime to catch up on what I missed, I am completely exhausted. And I haven’t had to worry about whether I’ve understood the guilt or innocence of someone charged with a crime. So trying to struggle through a day in court without video captioning is a non-starter for me.
The good news is that the court officer was so understanding and so quick to release me. I was ready for a long day of trying to explain why their amplifiers wouldn’t work for me. The courthouse I was called to in Woburn, Massachusetts is brand new and wired to the hilt with all kinds of amplification, plus they provide personal listening amplifiers for people who need them. Unfortunately I’ve had long experience trying to make those devices work, and while they provide an incremental improvement, they don’t provide the kind of comprehensive understanding that CART video transcription provides.
Most likely, I didn’t have to explain myself because they’ve been down this road often enough to understand that, given the fact CART is now a reasonable ADA accommodation, it’s unreasonable not to provide the service. I appreciate how understanding they were and how quick they were to let me go, but at the end of the day my preference would have been to have access to the communication service I need so that I could step up and perform my civic duty.
It’s Better Hearing and Speech Month
Better Hearing and Speech Month is a 75-year-old tradition celebrated every May. The American Speach Language Hearing Association website has some nice ideas on how you can promote it, along with materials you can download and/or buy. Enjoy.
Congressman Markey Demands Internet-Video Captions For Hard-Of-Hearing Web Surfers
Democratic US Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts is backing a bill that would require major producers of web videos to provide captioning, a piece of legislation that provides many other benefits for people with hearing, vision and other disabilities.
Congressman Ed Markey
Markey is one of the most senior legislators in Congress and a leader in shaping the nation’s telecommunications policies. When he puts his whole weight behind a piece of communications legislation he usually gets it passed. So my recent cry for more web captions has been answered from on high! Federal legislation might also help motivate more standards for web-video formats, especially captioning, which still requires some work. Another element of the legislation would require that phones used for Internet calls (voice over IP calls) be compatible with hearing aids in the same way regular phone equipment now must work with hearing aids. For more on this landmark legislation, read today’s Boston Globe article. I’ll be tracking this one closely.
Don’t Blend Your Hearing Aids, Recycle Them Through The Lions Club
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 unused 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 recycled 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.
Why Don’t Hearing-Aid Companies Caption Their YouTube Videos?
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.
Granted, a number of the videos don’t have any speaking parts or voiceovers, only some techno or new-age music with a lot of imagery and simple printed content. But if you depend on captioning as I do, it’s always nice to be notified even when nothing is being said (as when the captions say “…ominous music” with musical note signs). I think hard-of-hearing viewers should be much more vocal demanding captioning not just on TV and on DVDs, but on the web as well.
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?
Buy Oticon Delta ‘Think Pink’ Hearing Aids And Fight Breast Cancer
Oticon is putting its money where its mouth is with donations to the American Cancer Society tied to purchases of its Delta hearing aids during Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October.
Oticon's 'Think Pink' Campaign Fights Breast Cancer
Oticon has done its share of glitzy marketing of its minimalist, “trendy, triangular” Delta hearing aids with fashionable colors and a desiign featuring an advanced receiver in the ear with a near-invisible wire to the behind-the-ear device. Good design is important to help customers get past the lingering stigma of wearing hearing aids. But the company also distinguishes itself with a strong focus on patients’ real hearing needs. For instance, Oticon is a leader in pediatric hearing solutions, investing a lot of time and professional resources not just in products designed specifically for children but also in support systems for parents and educators who must help kids learn to cope with their hearing loss while adapting to hearing aids successfully.
