New ‘Buy A Hearing Aid’ Web Site Provides Good Information On Hearing Aid Brands Along With Referrals To An Audiologist Near You

There is a new web site devoted to helping hearing-aid buyers sort through what products on the market will best meet their needs and find a reputable audiologist nearby who can help them. Buy a Hearing Aid provides detailed information about the major hearing aid brands and makes it easy to compare and contrast features and benefits. And if you provide them with your zip code and email address, they will refer you to an audiologist in your neighborhood who can fit you with a new pair of hearing aids.

Buyers need to beware of the growing number of sites on the web that purport to offer information on hearing-aid choices, but which have actually been set up just to generate search traffic and advertising revenue, without offering substantive or even helpful information. That’s why it’s nice to see an addition to the few reputable sites (such as Hearing Planet which I’ve written about before) that are staffed by professionals who know what advice consumers need and who can provide appropriate referrals to the right kind of hearing-health professionals.

The Buy a Hearing Aid site is the brainchild of Mark Brumback of Hearing Aid Express, one of the largest independently owned and operated hearing-aid sellers in the U.S. with primary locations in Houston and Dallas, Texas. (It is also among the first North American hearing-aid companies to sell the new Panasonic line of hearing aids). Hearing Aid Express fits multiple brands of hearing aids, and the company’s breadth and depth of knowledge of the various hearing-aid brands  is now presented on the Buy a Hearing Aid site for three classes of consumers: those who have never owned hearing aids, those who currently own hearing aids, and those who are interested in buying hearing aids.

Petar Dimov, a web developer and search optimization expert, built the site and is developing a comprehensive database of all hearing aid brands and models. Audiologists can pay a small annual fee to have details of their practice presented on the site including any sales offers to attract local customers.

U.S. Senate Passes Twenty-First Century Communications And Video Accessibility Act Of 2010 By Unanimous Consent

The U.S. Senate passed the 21st Century Communications and video Accessibility Act (S. 3304) by unanimous consent, virtually assuring that the disability rights act guaranteeing access by deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind and vision-impaired consumers to all forms of media will become law.

Passage was expected after the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved its version of the same bill, H.R. 3101, last week, and now all that is required is reconciliation of the two bills, a final vote in the House and President Obama’s signature. In what House sponsor Rep. Edward Markey has called “online ramps to the Internet” for people with disabilities, the new law will, among many other things:

• Require captioned television programs to be captioned when delivered over the Internet.
• Authorize the FCC to require 7 hours per week of TV video description for vision-impaired people on the top 4 network channels and top 5 cable channels nationwide.
• Allocate up to $10 million per year for communications equipment used by individuals who are deaf-blind.
• Require devices of any size to be capable of displaying closed captioning, delivering available video description, and making emergency information accessible.
• Require accessible user controls for televisions and set-top boxes, and easy access to closed captioning and video description.

The new law is a huge step forward for people with disabilities in an age when equal access to Internet services is an absolute must for anyone to successfully earn a living and enjoy the quality of life that other accommodations have enabled ever since passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) 20 years ago.

U.S. Hearing Aid Sales Recovery Stalls In Second Quarter Of 2010 Even As Veterans Administration Fits More Hearing Aids Than Ever

Are we in for a double-dip recession in the hearing-aid business? According to the most recent analysis of U.S. hearing aid sales by the Hearing Industries Association (HIA), the number of hearing aids sold in the U.S. only grew by 2.9 percent in the second quarter of 2010. When you exclude an 11.6 percent increase in units bought by the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA), which now purchases 20 percent of the hearing aids sold in the U.S., the American market grew by an anemic one percent in the quarter. Similarly, in the entire first half of 2010, the overall market grew 4.2 percent, with VA sales growing 15 percent but private sales growing only by 1.8 percent over the first half of 2009.

The slowdown from the much faster sales ramp in 2009 is bad news for an industry hoping for a quick recovery from the 2008-2009 recession. It may also indicate that even the raft of new products and capabilities introduced by hearing aid manufacturers in the past two years may not be enough to spark the long-awaited takeoff in hearing aid sales to a generation of Baby Boom consumers steadily losing their hearing at predictable rates.

The surge in government-funded purchases by the VA can be attributed to loosened restrictions on reimbursement for veterans needing hearing aids over the past several years, as well as to the age wave of Korean War and Vietnam War veterans now requiring hearing assistance and the many younger veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with hearing damaged by overexposure to environmental noise in the war zones.

While the government-supported VA market is a welcome shot in the arm to the industry, it’s still an open question why sales to ordinary consumers have yet to take off. With up to a third of the 35 million Americans in need of hearing assistance doing without hearing aids, the question to answer is “when,” not “if.” However, the poor sales improvement in 2010 so far makes it clear the hearing aid industry has yet to crack the code to realizing the expected surge in sales to a market that needs hearing assistance more and more all the time.

GN ReSound Alera Arrives With A Dose Of Hyperbole, But Wireless Features Set The Bar Higher For Premium Hearing Aids

The wireless features in the new GN ReSound Alera family of hearing aids, which start shipping this week, are very similar to those found in several other high-end hearing aids already announced by other manufacturers. But, taken together, they help set the bar higher for premium hearing aids and assistive listening devices in general. The only question is how much better the new wireless features will make the new hearing aids from GN ReSound and other manufacturers when users start trying them out in the field.

One of the first things you learn in Marketing 101 is that  ”first,” “best” and “only” are some of the strongest words in the English language. So it’s no surprise that in the increasingly competitive hearing-aid industry, manufacturers are starting to use those words more often. GN ReSound’s news release announcing first shipments of the Alera hearing aids is a good example, claiming the company has come up with “the first truly wireless hearing aid with no strings attached.” The news release goes on to announce “a new approach to the way a hearing aid receives sound from devices such as TVs, stereos, cell phones and computers,” claiming that, “for the first time the patient can receive sound directly from the device without cables, wires or the need to wear uncomfortable accessories.”

That’s an exciting claim, except for the fact that, at least two other leading manufacturers that I know of have already announced products delivering very similar benefits by streaming wireless audio directly into their hearing aids. The new Widex Clear 440 family of hearing aids provides wireless streaming of cell phone and television signals directly into the hearing aids, without cables or wires, and the Oticon Streamer has been transmitting Bluetooth signals from a distance of up to 20 inches into hearing aids since its introduction along with the Oticon Epoq family of hearing aids in 2007. So it’s worth a close look at how GN ReSound is the “first” or “only.”

• UPDATE (Aug. 9): According to Karen Sams, a marketing representative for GN ReSound (see her comment at the end of this post), the Alera hearing aids’ proprietary 2.4 GHz transmission scheme eliminates the transmission delay that causes echoing and signal degradation in other wireless hearing aid products. It also transmits over longer distances than other hearing aid manufacturers’ wireless products, with the Alera Unite TV streamer broadcasting directly from your television set into your hearing aids — without requiring a second device worn on the body to relay the signal into your hearing aids. Not requiring an intermediary relay streamer is a real advantage that I’ve only seen with the GN ReSound Alera products. Most wireless hearing-aid products still use near-field magnetic induction, transmitting from the streamer through an  induction loop into the telecoils in your hearing aids. I’ve experienced widely varying results with wireless induction, especially the signal distortions and delays that GN ReSound says it is solving with the Alera wireless products featuring near-field induction technology. So GN ReSound is backing up its claim to be first to deliver new technology with new user benefits.

However, while bragging rights about who is first may be important for a while, at the end of the day the market will vote for “best.” And on that score it’s clear GN ReSound is in a neck-and-neck competition with other makers of premium-brand hearing aids to lead in delivering new wireless features that will substantially improve the experience of hearing-aid users. In the past, the only way to get audio from an MP3 player or your cell phone or your TV was to either plug them directly into a Direct Audio Interface (DAI) shoe, a clumsy connector at the base of your behind-the-ear hearing aid that wires you directly to the device, or else stream the audio through an induction loop you wear around your neck which transmits through the telecoils in your hearing aids. The new technologies from Widex, Oticon and GN ReSound skip that intermediary step with devices that transmit directly into your hearing aids from distances ranging from 20 inches to more than 20 feet.

The Bluetooth phone streamers are small and have enough range to transmit from within your coat pocket; however, as you need to speak as well as listen, you need to fasten the microphone to your lapel (GN ReSound Unite Phone Clip) or hang the device from your neck (Oticon Streamer) or hold it up and speak into it like any cell phone (Widex M-DEX). The TV streamers are more interesting, with the new GN ReSound Alera’s Unite TV Streamer an impressive product that plugs into the TV and transmits TV audio directly into your hearing aids over a distance of up to 7 meters (23 feet).

So I am looking forward to the marketplace voting on which of the new packages of wireless features from high-end hearing-aid manufacturers is best. Most likely, different brands will meet slightly different sets of needs for different users, who will gravitate to the solutions based on whether they are heavy Bluetooth phone users or whether they watch a lot of TV. In any case, the new wireless technologies are setting the bar a notch higher for all makers of high-end hearing aids, where the market soon will be demanding more and better ways of integrating hearing-aid users with all the listening, communication and entertainment environments they encounter.

Big Movie Theater Chains See Writing On Wall And Start To Provide More Closed Captions

On the same day that the U.S. Justice Department was asking for comments on a proposed rule requiring movie theaters to provide closed captions for hard-of-hearing customers along with audio descriptions for blind theatergoers, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley was finalizing an agreement with three of the biggest movie theater chains to dramatically increase accessibility options at movie theaters throughout the state.

It’s no coincidence that the major theater chains are finally agreeing to provide more accessibility services at the same time the government is making noises about strengthening its mandates. In Massachusetts, the agreement was a settlement of a formal civil rights complaint brought by deaf and blind residents alleging discrimination because of the absence of accessible technology.

The Justice Department put theater owners on notice it was considering changing its regulations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to mandate closed captioning and audio descriptions at all theater locations. In a notice published in the Federal Register, the Justice Department noted the slow progress the industry had made in providing accessibility options in spite of advances in technology making captioning and audio descriptions easier than in the past:

The Department is concerned about what appears to be a significant disconnect between the production of movies that have captioning and video description capabilities and the actual exhibition or availability of such movies to individuals with sensory disabilities. The Department also is concerned that even when captioned and video described movies are exhibited, their showings appear to be relegated to the middle of the week or midday showings.

The publication of the notice about the proposed rule change is the start of a three-to-six month process that will include comments by all parties, hearings, and ultimately a decision to revise the regulations or maintain the status quo.

The consent agreement in Massachusetts may indicate which way the political winds are blowing and presage similar agreement to increase accessibility nationally. Three of the nation’s biggest theater owners, National Amusements, Inc. (which runs Showcase Cinemas), American Multi-Cinema (AMC Theaters) and the Regal Entertainment Group (Regal Theaters) agreed to ensure that every location in Massachusetts is equipped with accessible technology that will provide meaningful access to the hearing and visually impaired, including captioning technology and description technology.

Captioning technology takes a movie’s sound (dialogue, music, sound-effects) and converts it to a captioned format that a hearing impaired audience member can read.  Description technology provides a narration of what is displayed visually on the movie screen (action, scene changes, facial expressions) during natural pauses in the movie’s soundtrack through headphones worn by the visually impaired.

Additionally, the theaters agreed that multiplexes with 10 or more screens will have at least two accessible auditoriums, one of which will be in the locations’ largest auditorium — a huge benefit to theatergoers frustrated that the captioned movies are never the ones they want to see. By requiring captioning and audio descriptions in the largest auditorium, hearing and visually impaired patrons won’t have to wait for blockbuster films to make their way to the smaller auditoriums that have historically been equipped with accessibility equipment.

All in all, a banner week for captioning advocates, capping the celebrations of the 20th Anniversary of the signing of the ADA legislation and passage in the U.S. House of Representatives, by a huge margin, of H.R. 3101, the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, that will require more accessibility over the Internet including closed captioning of TV shows broadcast on the web.

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