Hansaton’s Jerry Yanz Predicts Hearing Industry Will Get A Charge From Rechargeable Hearing Aids

If you can recharge your cell phone once and it will work for several days, why can’t you do the same thing with your hearing aids? Jerry L. Yanz of Hansaton will tell anyone within earshot why. More important, he will tell you how yesterday’s inadequate rechargeable hearing aids are being replaced by new rechargeables that actually work the way you do–all day long.

Until recently, the few rechargeable hearing aids on the market had significant limitations. Often their charge lasted less than a full day, so if you depended on them from morning to night, you were out of luck.

Many first-generation rechargeable hearing aids also suffered from the problem you had with early cell phone batteries — if you recharged them before they were completely empty, they would run out of gas quicker and quicker after each charge.

As a result, most hearing aids today still require non-rechargeable, disposable batteries. The batteries last a few days or, if you’re lucky, more than a week. But no matter how energy-efficient your hearing aids are, you end up buying dozens of batteries a year at up to a dollar a piece. It’s expensive, and disposing of so many dead batteries is wasteful and bad for the environment.

But there’s good news: Hansaton solved the problems of first-generation rechargeables to many users’ satisfaction more than a year ago when it introduced its new AQ 2G hearing aids featuring the AQ Custom ITE (in-the-ear) and AQ X-Mini RIC (receiver-in-the-canal) models. Jerry Yanz, PhD and director of audiology at Hansaton Acoustics, is a long-time hearing-industry evangelist who has been banging the drum for rechargeable hearing aids as a solution whose time has finally come. He recently co-authored an article in the Hearing Review telling you everything you need to know about the new rechargeable hearing aids.

The new Hansaton hearing aids keep their charge for 20 hours or longer and fully recharge in less than eight hours. Unless you sleep with your hearing aids turned on, you get to use them during all your waking hours. If you wear contact lenses and take them out only when you go to bed and pop them back in when you wake up, now you can follow the same routine with your hearing aids.

Other manufacturers with rechargeables already on the market as well as new entrants will be racing to catch up to with new rechargeables that deliver the mainstream features that Hansaton is promoting. When they do, customers will have a choice of fully functional rechargeables to compare against traditional hearing aids requiring disposable batteries.

If you are shopping for rechargeable hearing aids, Yanz and his co-authors suggest asking questions such as: How long will the charge last? Will the power really last all day? How long do they take to to recharge? Will they be fully charged even after a short night’s sleep? How long will the rechargeable batteries last before I have to replace them? Will the manufacturer replace them for me? And how convenient and easy is the recharging system?

When multiple manufacturers along with Hansaton are able to come up with satisfactory answers to all those questions, we may see the day when rechargeable hearing aids are as familiar as our rechargeable cell phones.

Oticon Enters Invisible Hearing Aid Market With Intiga-I For First-Time Users

Oticon has jumped into the hot market for “invisible” hearing aids–tiny devices that sit deep within the ear canal–with its new Intiga-I model for first-time users.

The Intiga-I hearing aid has a nanocoated wax protection system and a T- cap microphone protection system that will enable the device to withstand the moist environment of the deep ear canal. And it features Oticon’s high-end SpeechGuard sound processing technology as well as the company’s Rise 2 amplifier which conserves battery power.

The Oticon Intiga-I joins other major brands’ entries into the popular market for small invisible hearing aids aimed at first-time users, including the Starkey AMP, promoted as the first hearing aid “for people who aren’t ready for a hearing aid.”

The Intiga-I follows last year’s introduction of the Oticon Intiga, a small, high-performance on-the-ear open-fit hearing aid that the company promotes as “the world’s smallest fully wireless hearing solution,” enabling the hearing aid to act as a wireless, hands-free headset for cell phones and other entertainment devices.

Now That Neurotone Has Put Its LACE Listening Training Software Online, There’s No Excuse Not To Use It

Have you ever had trouble understanding your dinner partners in a noisy restaurant? Neurotone’s new web version of its popular auditory training software, LACE Online, may be just what you need.

LACE is a proven method of training your brain to better understand speech in challenging listening environments. Now that it’s directly accessible on the web, with an attractive $79 retail price ($59 if you take advantage of the limited time introductory offer), it may be the easiest and least expensive investment you’ll ever make to achieve better hearing.

Neurotone has long marketed the LACE software to audiologists, who use it to help new hearing-aid users better cope with their hearing loss. No matter how big a help the hearing aids may be, developing effective listening skills is equally important in understanding speech and keeping up with conversations.

I went through the original DVD-based LACE training a few years ago, and it quickly improved my ability to understand speech in noise. Taking me through a series of listening exercises — tracking conversations in noisy settings, trying to understand one speaker when two people are talking, keeping up with a fast talker, learning to retain key words in sentences to improve contextual understanding — the program tracked and documented my improvement over more than a week of training.

Research at the University of California in San Francisco that led to the development of LACE demonstrated that auditory cognition — your brain’s ability to comprehend speech in noise — can dramatically improve with training. When you couple auditory training with a technical assist from hearing aids, the improvement in hearing is far more dramatic than depending on the hearing aids by themselves.

As a result, audiologists who prescribe LACE along with hearing aids get fewer complaints about the hearing aids not working, because patients are doing their part to make them work. And follow-up visits for programming improvements are more successful, because patients learn to be conscious of the kinds of amplification that will help them most in understanding speech.

Independent researchers have documented improvements of up to 40 percent in difficult listening situations. The latest evidence comes from a Northwestern University study that concluded:

Trained subjects exhibited significant improvements in speech-in-noise perception that were retained 6 months later….We provide the first demonstration that short-term training can improve the neural representation of cues important for speech-in-noise perception. These results implicate and delineate biological mechanisms contributing to learning success, and they provide a conceptual advance to our understanding of the kind of training experiences that can influence sensory processing in adulthood.

LACE training speeds up what works naturally to a greater or lesser degree for all people with hearing loss: over time, your brain learns to compensate for diminished ability to hear by zeroing in on verbal cues that enable you to catch more meaning from less comprehensible sound.

When I got my first pair of hearing aids, my audiologist took me for a walk outside to show me what they could and couldn’t do. In addition to pointing out the sounds I hadn’t been hearing (birds singing), she walked me through the Mass General cafeteria at lunch hour and told me all the things my hearing aids wouldn’t do for me — especially amplifying a noisy environment and thus making it more difficult, not easier, to hear.

But then she said, “Come back in six months, and you’ll be surprised at how much better you hear, not just because you’ll get used to your hearing aids, but because your brain constantly adjusts and helps you get better at understanding.” Sure enough, she was right. Six months later I went to the same cafeteria with a friend, and conversation was much, much easier. My brain really had gradually gotten a lot better at processing speech in noise. However, I’m convinced if LACE had been available then and I’d gone through the program right away, I would have reached the same level of comprehension in days or a couple of weeks instead of six months.

LACE Online makes it a lot easier to access auditory training than earlier versions, which came on DVDs and CD-ROMs, and it performs extremely well. One of the challenges of a highly interactive online site with a lot of audio and video is to deliver response times fast enough to keep up with the user’s pace through the program. LACE Online met all my expectations for immediate response times, not only with my high-bandwidth fiber connection to my desktop, but also when I used the much slower 3G wireless data connection with my iPad2 (LACE Online doesn’t depend on Flash, so all the videos run beautifully on the iPad).

Another challenge with interactive online training sites is the user interface, but LACE Online is intuitive and simple to navigate. Plus they’ve paid special attention to hard-of-hearing customers who depend on speech-reading: in the videos featuring Robert W. Sweetow, PhD, the clinical professor of otolaryngology and director of audiology at UCSF Medical Center whose research provided much of the foundation for LACE, Dr. Sweetow enunciates and shapes his words slowly and carefully enough to be helpful to even the newest speech reader.

I’ve just finished the first and second of 11 days of training with LACE Online, and I’m finding it’s a great refresher from my original run through the program. And going through the easy interactive lessons again reminded me that LACE is not just for people with hearing aids. The LACE training can help virtually anyone who’s ever had a problem understanding their companions in a noisy restaurant — which means it could help just about everyone.

Check Out This Awesome Video On Why Cochlear Implant Users Can’t Hear Music Well

Kudos to Hearing Review for catching this awesome video of a TED conference talk on why cochlear implant users can’t hear music well. This one hits home for me, because when I lost most of my hearing nine years ago, music suddenly became a discordant jumble of noise that was impossible to enjoy any more. Now I find it’s exactly what cochlear implantees experience.

Dr. Charles Limb describes how devastating the loss of  music can be to his cochlear implant patients while explaining in layman’s terms why it happens. As both a musician and a cochlear implant surgeon, he combines his two passions to study the way the brain creates and perceives music. He is an Associate Professor, Otolaryngology, Head & Neck Surgery, at Johns Hopkins who performs cochlear implantations on patients who have lost their hearing. He is also an accomplished musician on the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory of Music who plays sax, piano and bass.

If you listen to the comparison on the video between “normal” symphonic music and an estimation of what people with cochlear implants hear, you will understand the problem better. Cochlear implantees can’t hear the difference–both sound equally bad (I can’t hear the difference either).

Part of the problem is that neither cochlear implants nor hearing aids are optimized as much for music as for speech. The chart that Dr. Limb displays shows the frequencies and sound levels you need to replicate or amplify for speech, versus the much wider range of frequencies required to convey the richness of music.

But the problem also extends to the brain’s ability to process sound as both music and speech, including the emotional impact music can have. Dr. Limb is fascinated with the idea “that acoustic vibrations in the air can make you feel deep emotion, something that can affect your life.” Music requires a comprehension of pitch, tone and timbre, but cochlear implantees, and people like me with certain kinds of hearing damage, can’t discern warmth in a tone or the timbre of a violin versus a trumpet–qualities that enable music to stir powerful emotions.

The interaction between the mechanical hearing functions and how the brain processes sound and music still is not very well understood. Sound waves are shaped within the ear canal and transmitted through the ear drum and middle-ear bones to the hearing-hair-cell nerves in the cochlea, where they are transformed into electrical impulses carried by the auditory nerve. But then the brain takes over and interprets those sound waves, understanding them as speech, music, a baby’s chatter or cry, random noise or other sounds.

Readers of Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks will be familiar with the mysteries of how the brain processes sound. I found some comfort in the research the book reviewed on the brain’s amazing ability to rewire itself to improve its comprehension of audio inputs after the hearing organs have been damaged. In one of his case histories (and to a lesser degree in my own experience), the brain is able to improve its comprehension of speech over time, and to a lesser extent music as well–to fill in the gaps when the hearing organs are malfunctioning.

But as Dr. Limb makes clear, a lot more is unknown than known at this point. How the brain processes and discerns the quality of music — pitch, tone and timbre — is relatively new territory for researchers. While cochlear implants (and hearing aids) have been wildly successful in restoring the ability of the deaf to hear and understand speech, there’s still a long way to go before they can restore a complete ability to appreciate music.

“If you had a sense to lose, we are furthest along medically and surgically with hearing,” says Dr. Limb, but he adds, “Most implant users really struggle and dislike music because it sounds so bad. So when it comes to this idea of restoring beauty to somebody’s life, we have a long way to go.”

It’s Official: One In Five American Adults Has Hearing Loss

The recent Johns Hopkins survey of hearing loss in the United States, which finds that one in five Americans aged 12 and over suffers from hearing loss, shouldn’t surprise anyone. But it’s still a shocker, especially when you realize that only a small minority of that 20 percent is getting any help for their hearing loss.

Those of us who write about hearing loss usually cite government data putting the number in the range of 30 to 35 million Americans. The Johns Hopkins study says 30 million American adults–about 12 percent–have hearing loss in two ears, and that 48 million, or 20 percent, have hearing loss in at least one ear.

The survey also uses the World Health Organization’s definition of hearing loss: not being able to hear sounds of 25 decibels or less in speech frequencies. So the results are relevant to the hearing health care profession.

The Johns Hopkins hearing-loss survey is important because it’s hard to find current data from an impeccable source. Johns Hopkins is one of the world’s top public-health research institutions, so its count is probably the most accurate new assessment of the prevalence of hearing loss in the U.S. The survey used data from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys (NHANES) conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and the painstaking methodology the researchers used provide credibility to their claim that the results are representative of a cross-section of Americans.

The study’s authors say the findings “suggest that many more people than previously thought are affected by this condition,” which isn’t a surprise, as they used more recent data than many of the other studies that are more often quoted. It just reinforces the intuitive conclusion that as the Baby Boom generation ages, the incidence of hearing loss across the population is going to increase at a predictable rate.

But the “one in five” headline is still a shocker. Especially when you realize that only a small minority of that 20 percent is getting any help for their hearing loss. Let’s see if the headlines make a difference.

Nearly Half Of AARP-ASHA Survey Respondents Say Their Hearing Is Getting Worse, But Majority Fail To Take Action

Why do so many people who know their hearing is getting worse fail to seek treatment? That question screams from the remarkable survey results just released by AARP and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASLH).

There are a number of answers, but according to the survey, the high cost of hearing aids and inadequate insurance coverage for hearing-loss treatment (or lack of health insurance entirely) are high on the list of reasons people don’t seek out help for their hearing problems.

Check out some of the results of the survey of AARP members:

• While 88 percent said they had their vision tested in the past five years, less than half that number, 43 percent, had their hearing checked.
• But in the same period, nearly half (46 percent) said their hearing has gotten worse, with 61 percent saying they have difficulty following conversations in noisy situations.
• And even though 85 percent said maintaining hearing health is of great importance to them personally, 57 percent of respondents with hearing difficulties said they are not seeking treatment.
• Why do they fail to seek treatment? Here’s the kicker: “Nearly two-thirds of poll respondents (63 percent) cite health insurance coverage limitations, concerns about cost, and lack of health insurance as reasons for not getting treatment for hearing difficulties.”

AARP is the world’s biggest organization for people over the age of 50, and when it zeroes in on an issue it can move mountains. What would happen if AARP got on the hearing-loss bandwagon in a big way? Would we see more insurance companies providing coverage for hearing aids? Would we see more pressure on hearing-aid manufacturers to provide more affordable solutions?

Unfortunately, there may be an even bigger problem than high costs and lack of insurance coverage for the failure of people to seek out help. The survey also reveals there’s still a tremendous fear of the stigma that, rightly or wrongly, so many people associate with hearing loss. When you read the full report on the results (click here to download the PDF), you see too many troubling mentions of survey respondents wanting to “cover up” evidence of their hearing loss:

Fifty-seven percent of those with untreated hearing problems say their problems don’t warrant treatment and are easy enough to “cover up.” The foremost reason for not seeking treatment is a perception that their hearing issue isn’t severe enough – that they are getting by without treatment. They seem to have found ways that they believe cover up their hearing issues, and do not see a connection to an improved quality of life that treatment may provide.

Maybe the best result of the AARP focus on the hearing-loss issue will be a reduction in the stigma associated with hearing aids and a greater acceptance by the over-50 Baby Boomer set of the notion that a little help with their hearing could go a long way. But I’m not holding my breath!

Study Linking Hearing Loss To Dementia Raises More Questions Than It Answers

When Johns Hopkins researchers demonstrated a strong correlation between hearing loss and dementia, they confirmed previous research on the same subject but failed to answer what the study’s author termed “the 50-billion-dollar question”—whether hearing aids or cochlear implants correcting hearing loss could serve to prevent the onset of dementia.

The new study, published in the Archives of Neurology, used data collected by the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging to follow more than 600 dementia-free adults between the ages of 36 and 90 for an average of 12 years. Those who had hearing loss at the start of the study were significantly more likely to develop dementia: those with mild, moderate, and severe hearing loss had twofold, threefold, and fivefold, respectively, the risk of developing dementia over time.

But according to the principal author of the study, ear surgeon Frank Lin, M.D., Ph.D., the results do nothing to answer the most obvious questions it raises: Might hearing loss be a cause of dementia? Or does hearing loss simply accompany dementia, without any cause or effect? Can diagnosed hearing loss can be used to predict onset of dementia? And that 50-billion-dollar question: can hearing correction enabling seniors to communicate better actually fend off onset of dementia? Additional research will be required to answer any of these questions, let alone understand why there is a connection at all. Two earlier studies, one in 1989 and another in 2008, came to a similar conclusion but left open the same questions.

“We really need to begin studying what the exact mechanism is,” Lin told Fox News. “And we need to begin studying whether hearing aids could have an effect on the onset of dementia.”

Harvard Health Study Finds 20 Percent Of U.S. Adolescents Have Significant Hearing Loss–But Will We Do Anything About It?

Researchers at Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have concluded that nearly one in five American adolescents suffers from the same degree of hearing loss comparable to the age-related loss normally found in adults in their ’50s and ’60s. And people immediately are pointing the finger of blame at all the usual suspects: rock concerts, cell phones, and the ubiquitous Apple iPod and other portable music players. That’s all well and good, but it begs the question of all the other environmental noise people are subjected to from birth. The sad fact is we’re living in a much noisier world than 20 or 30 years ago, and no matter how many times we tell people to turn down the iPod, there is no substitute for a far more organized response to the epidemic of environmental noise-related hearing loss than we have seen to date. Read more

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.

Product Review: Songbird Ultra Digital Hearing Aids Are A Good First Step If You Think You Might Need Hearing Assistance

I purchased a Songbird Ultra Digital Hearing Aid over the internet recently and have been trying it out myself and with other users in different listening situations. The good news is that the inexpensive entry-level device is a true open-fit, behind-the-ear digital hearing aid that performs like other comparable low-end hearing-aids. That’s also the bad news: because it performs like other comparable low-end hearing-aids, it has many of the same drawbacks you find in many entry-level digital hearing aids.

But given the Songbird Ultra’s ultra-low $300 (USD) price compared to many other digital hearing aids with similar features, for me the net takeaway is that it’s a great first step for those who think they might need hearing assistance but aren’t yet ready to take the plunge with a visit to an audiologist that will most likely end up costing several thousand dollars or more. You can think of the Songbird Ultra in the same way a first-time home buyer thinks of a “starter home”: buy it at an affordable price, get used to the demands of owning it, and spend some time in a perfectly adequate situation until you get to know exactly what kinds of features you want when you can afford a more expensive one.

Songbird is a leader in the new class of “over-the-counter” (OTC) hearing aids that you can buy and use right away without a prescription from an audiologist (think of reading glasses purchased at the pharmacy versus prescription eyeglasses purchased from an optometrist), which I’ve written about before. If you are a Baby Boomer struggling with the early signs of high-frequency hearing loss — i.e., you can’t hear what they’re saying on TV or in the movies as well as you used to, understanding conversation in restaurants is more challenging, and your spouse and children are starting to complain you either don’t listen or can’t hear — it’s worth investigating OTC hearing aids. You can buy them online, try them out, and in the case of the Songbird Ultra, if you don’t like it, just return it within the 30-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee period.

Buying a Songbird hearing aid is a snap: just go to the company’s web site, get out your credit card, and follow the directions. The hearing aid arrives in an attractive package with a carrying case, cleaning tools and a pack of standard 312 hearing-aid batteries. You get left-ear and right-ear tubes with sound tips so you can use the hearing aid with either ear. The soft, pliable open-ear tips are comfortable and easy to insert, and they solve the one-size-fits-all problem with a generous length of tubing to the processor that sits behind the ear, and a retention cord extending from the ear tip that is easy to grab when you want to remove the hearing aid but which also sits in the bowl of the ear and applies just enough pressure back on the tip to keep it snuggled deep within the ear canal. There is also a well-laid-out user instructional brochure that makes care, use and troubleshooting of the Songbird Ultra crystal clear. Read more

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