Hearing Aid

It’s no big secret that wearing in-ear devices, such as stereo earphones or hearing aids, can cause the ears to hurt over time. According to the engineers at Colorado’s Asius Technologies, however, this isn’t due simply to a poor fit or high volume levels. Instead, it’s caused by an “acoustic reflex,” that no amount of earbud-reshaping or decreases in volume will alleviate. There are reportedly ways of minimizing or even eliminating what’s known as “listener fatigue,” though – these include a flexible membrane, and even an inflatable ear-tip device created by Asius. Read More

If you had to use a commuting bicycle in a race, you would probably set about removing the kickstand, fenders, racks and lights to make the thing as fast and efficient as possible. When engineers at Houston’s Rice University are developing small, fast, energy-efficient chips for use in devices like hearing aids, it turns out they do pretty much the same thing. The removal of portions of circuits that aren’t essential to the task at hand is known as “probabilistic pruning,” and it results in chips that are twice as fast, use half the power, and are half the size of conventional chips. Read More

According to United Nations’ World Health Organization, there are approximately 278 million people worldwide suffering from moderate to profound hearing loss. It is not surprising that many of those people have particular difficulty with telephone communications and programs through the Internet. When telephone conversations are conducted via computer networks using the Internet Protocol, ambient noise and acoustic echoes often impede the conversation. For the hearing impaired, it is especially problematic - most of the time they need to increase the volume to try and follow the conversation. However, by doing so, the background noises are also intensified and signal frequencies become virtually intolerable. In response to this growing problem, developers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Oldenburg have come up with a digital solution. Read More

It’s become an accepted fact of life that people tend to lose much of their hearing as they get old. This is because our hair cells, the cells in our ears which allow us to hear, cannot regenerate - we’re born with 30,000 per ear, but once they die off or get damaged, they’re gone for good. Stefan Heller, a professor of otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat stuff) at Stanford University, wants to change that. To that end, he recently succeeded in creating mouse hair cells in a petri dish. Could an end to deafness be far behind? Read More

Austrian mobile phone-manufacturer Emporia has released two new models - the Elegant and the Solid - at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The new handsets add to the company’s range aimed at seniors, mobility impaired users and other groups who primarily just wan to make and receive calls. Both feature a high contrast OLED 1.8-inch screen, a magnifying function that lets you enlarge the characters on screen, large buttons, and an extra loud speaker that is compatible with hearing aids. Read More

Just as people with sight in only one eye have problems with depth perception, those with impaired hearing in one ear, known as unilateral hearing loss (UHL) or single-sided deafness (SSD), face difficulty in localizing sound. Addressing the problem with a hearing aid worn in the mouth might not sound like a logical solution, but that’s just what medical device company Sonitus Medical is doing with SoundBite - a hearing system that transmits sound to the inner ear via the teeth. Read More

Touch-screen interfaces have already usurped traditional buttons on a range of mobile devices that boast a larger screen size and/or smaller form factor by doing away with a wide range of buttons or dedicated keypad. Now buttons of all sorts on all sorts of devices are under assault. Just last week Apple declared war on mouse buttons, and now hearing technology company, Starkey Laboratories, has taken aim at fiddly hearing aid buttons with its "Sweep Technology" touch-based interface for hearing aids. Read More

Cell phone and services provider, Consumer Cellular, has released two senior-friendly cell phones with bigger, raised buttons and easy-to-read display text. The Doro PhoneEasy 345 and 410 cell phones are designed by Swedish company Doro – with more than 30 years of product design experience – and are being offered exclusively by Consumer Cellular after they surveyed customers and found that 62 percent would prefer cell phones with these features. Read More

Hearing aids have come a long way since the ear trumpet; from the traditional aid that simply amplified sound and delivered it to the ear via an earpiece (air conduction), to the so-called "bionic ear" that works by directly stimulating auditory nerves inside the cochlea with an electric field. But the journey continues, with newer technologies which use the bones of the skull to conduct sound. Now Cochlear has launched a new direct bone conduction device, the BAHA BP100, that delivers significant improvements in speech understanding in noisy situations (about 25%) and better bone conduction hearing performance than ever before. It can also integrate with other lifestyle accessories such as iPods and Bluetooth adapters. Geoffrey Baird spoke with audiologist Anthea Arkcoll about the new device - listen to the Podcast or Read More