Other Issues
Here's where we put all the issues that don't fit nicely into our
other categories!
Railroad Safety
March 2006 - he recent death of Tara Rose McAvoy is a reminder of the
special dangers that railroads pose to people with hearing loss. If
you'd like someone to speak to your organization about railroad dangers,
Operation Lifesaver can help!
Economic Impact of Hearing Loss
May 2006
Hearing
loss is costing Australia almost $12 billion a year with 160,000 people
not working because they can't hear well enough, a new report has found.
Compiled by Access Economics, the report found the loss to the economy
equated to $3,314 for every one of the 3.55 million Australians who have
some form of hearing loss. Of the total financial $12 billion in economic
loss, more than half of it - $6.7 billion - is due to productivity loss.
And apart from the direct loss to the economy, Access estimates that
people with hearing loss suffer another $11.3 billion in what it terms
"disease burden".
Full Story
Music Appreciation
Wendy's Musical Adventures at the 2006 HLAA convention
July 2006
Losing the ability to understand speech is certainly the most
common issue reported by people with hearing loss. Losing the ability to
enjoy music might be second. So many of us are fascinated by people who
continue to pursue musical endeavors, in spite of their hearing loss. One
such person is Wendy Cheng, a cochlear implant user who is also amateur
musician and viola student. Wendy also manages a website and listserv for
musicians with hearing loss. Please visit http://www.aamhl.org to learn
more about the Association of Adult Musicians with Hearing Loss or to join
the listserv. Here's her
article
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Hearing Loss and Music: Enjoying Music with Cochlear
Implants or Hearing Aids
Here's another of Wendy's reports on the 2006 HLAA Convention. The
workshop Wendy is reporting on has some great tips on
how people with hearing
loss can increase their appreciation of music.
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February 2007
Music as an input to a hearing aid poses some
interesting problems both for the hearing aid design engineer and for
the hearing health-care professional. The following discussion equally
concerns the fitting of hearing aids for musicians, as well as for those
non-musicians who like to listen to music. In many cases, as will be
seen, the question really is “which hearing aid manufacturer would be
willing to make subtle changes for individual customers?”, rather than
“what is the best set of electro-acoustic parameters for users who
listen to music?” In order to understand the programming and internal
algorithm changes necessary for music as an input to a hearing aid or a
cochlear implant, four primary, physical differences between speech and
music need to be understood. Full
Story
July 2007 -
Here's our report on
the wonderful AAMHL concert performed at the 2007 HLAA convention!
November 2010
The Association of Adult Musicians With Hearing
Loss held its first New York concert recently, at the Bruno Walter
Auditorium in Lincoln Center, with a program entitled "Incredibly Musical
and Significantly Deaf: More Music With Less Hearing."
Charles Mokotoff, a classical guitarist who has a
day job working in IT with the National Institutes of Health, was up
first. Among his pieces was one by Edin Solis, a young Costa Rican
composer whom Mokotoff communicates with via e-mail. Later, Jennifer
Castellano played a tonal piece called Spectrum, Seven Preludes for Piano,
which she composed after seeing Spectrum V, a painting by Ellsworth Kelly,
at the Metropolitan Museum. It was reminiscent of the more percussive
sections of Keith Jarrett's 1975 improvisations in Köln, Germany, though
more optimistic. If you had walked in during either performance, you
wouldn't have guessed that either performer was deaf or hearing impaired.
Full
Story
Housing
May 2007 - A Visit to a Senior
Residence for Deaf and OHL Folks
Coping with Hearing Loss
April 2008
Restaurants are fun places. Good friends, good
food, generous libations. Let the good times roll at the local,
neighborhood watering hole where everybody knows your name. Problem is,
some restaurants are just too noisy. Clatter, the general background din
and yet another toast to "Scully" at the next table. Might be easier to
zap some mac and cheese in the microwave. The problem is exacerbated for
those who use hearing aids. Regardless of the device's technology, a
hearing aid can only do so much in a crowded bistro with tile walls. Man,
does that deliver an echo to the eardrum.
Full Story
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March 2009
Are you an organ donor? Many of us are. A small
imprint on your driver's license, a card you carry or bracelet you wear
identifies you as a giving, caring being who has agreed to donate organs
in case of accidental or natural death. In most instances, donors can
detail precisely which organs they wish to donate. Or, in some cases, the
donor leaves these decisions up to the professionals who best understand
how to use these precious gifts. One such organization is the National
Temporal Bone, Hearing and Balance Pathology Resource Registry, or the
National Temporal Bone Registry for short. This organization is tasked
with maintaining a database of temporal bone donations and donors. Why the
temporal bone? What's so important about this particular part of the human
anatomy? Well, it all comes down to hearing and balance - two processes of
the body that take place deep inside the ear and the temporal bones that
protect the hearing mechanism.
Full Story
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March 2009
"How do you drive if you can't hear?" is a
question I get a lot. And I normally answer, "I use my eyes when I drive.
What do you use?" A deaf friend responded to this same question by saying,
"I use my hands. My ears aren't able to reach the steering wheel." Indeed,
when my wife noticed she was losing her hearing, one of her fi rst worries
was, "Will I still be able to drive?" Apparently, many people think you
need to be able to hear in order to drive. I think a better criterion is
being able to see! In fact, people with long-standing, severe hearing loss
are some of the safest drivers around. One of the reasons for this is that
we have to rely almost entirely on our eyes. After all, driving is a
visual activity much more than it is an aural experience. Sure, there's
the issue of hearing horns honking, but when a person is visually alert,
she will have already seen the problem looming before another driver lays
on his horn. Besides, much of the horn-honking these days is just
impatient drivers sounding off and not genuine traffic warnings, so we
aren't really missing much in this respect.
Full Story
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March 2009
Attention all inventors, after-market auto
equipment manufacturers and car makers:It's long past time to use readily
available technology to make cars accessible to people with disabilities.
Where are the effective visual and tactile alerts for drivers with hearing
loss? In the past decade or more, some useful add-on devices appeared on
the market, but unfortunately, didn't last long. For example, there was
the Blinker Buddy that made the turn signal clicking sound louder and fl
ashed a special light on the dash. It is no longer available. There was
the Autominder that monitored the car's alerting signal. Whenever any
alert sounded, the Autominder amplified it and also flashed a special dash
light. It too has disappeared. For a while the Early Alert Response System
(EARS) device for sirens was available for certain cars. It, too, has gone
the way of the dodo bird.
Full Story
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November 2009
India is one of the few countries in the world
where the hearing impaired are not allowed to drive. But this may change
soon, with the government informing the Delhi High Court it is considering
changing its rules. "We are considering issuing driving licences to
hearing impaired people and thinking of amending our rules and
regulations," Additional Solicitor General A.S. Chandiok informed a
division bench of the high court comprising Chief Justice Ajit Prakash
Shah and Justice S. Muralidhar. The court has granted the government three
months' time to take a decision and posted the matter for Dec 16.
Full Story
