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.
williamylee says
Better hearing in noisy restaurents