Volume 30 Issue 3

HOH-LD-News
Vol. 30, Issue 3
January 20, 2007

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Table of Contents
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- Article 1: Introduction to mobile phones - Part 1

- Article 2: HLAA ED Admonishes CSD

- Article 3: Bilateral Cochlear Implants - Audiological Perspective

- Article 4: Short Takes

Our advertisers make it possible for us to provide HOH-LD-News as a free service. Please let them know you appreciate their support, and please mention that you saw their message in HOH-LD-News.

- Advertisers in this Issue
First Premium Placement:
Available - Contact larry@hearinglossweb.com
Second Premium Placement:
The Big 25th Anniversary Sale at Harris Communications
Third Premium Placement:
Hearing Aid Repairs from Hearing Haven
Fourth Premium Placement:
Switch to Sprint
Get your special Valentine's gift from Sound Clarity Inc.
Classified Section:
Two online stores and two employment opportunities

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Contact information and disclaimers are at the end of this newsletter.
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- Article 1: Introduction to mobile phones - Part 1
Presented by Scott Kelley
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With improvements in both telephone technology and hearing aid technology, more people with hearing loss are able to use mobile (cell) phones. Here's Motorola's Scott Kelley with great information on mobile phones and how to choose one.

This article is part of our coverage of the 2006 ALDA National Convention (ALDAcon). For more coverage of this great convention, please point your browser to http://www.hearinglossweb.com/res/hlorg/alda/cn/2006/2006.htm

This is part one of two parts.

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We'll be talking about a variety of phones, and one of them is this phone, the benefits of which go to fight AIDS in Africa. It's part of a national program that includes many items, all of which are red, and all of which benefit the AIDS fight. We have designated one of our Razor phones to be one of those items. So when you buy our Red phone, you're helping to fight AIDS.

We'll also talk about some of the regulations that affect wireless communications. What does the term "HAC" mean? Then a bit about TTY devices, and then look at some tips and tricks.

Cell phones started as radios. And even today they are closer to radios than to phones. The original phones came out of our radio department. If you think about how a cell phone works, it has a radio transmitter, which goes out and talks to a tower via radio frequency. From there, it may hook into the landline system so the signal can end up at a standard phone.

Cell phones started out as analog devices. One of the things that means is that the phone is talking to the tower continuously. A digital phone, on the other hand, turns on and off very rapidly. Cingular or T-Mobile phones turn on and off over 200 times a second. And they spend more time off than on. That means that 3 to 8 people can use the same signal bandwidth that is used by one analog caller. That's one of the main reason the service providers prefer digital.

But why does a consumer want digital? Well, for one thing digital provides a lot of features that are simply unavailable using analog. Another advantage of digital is that it maintains basically the same signal quality as long as there is connectivity. This is different from analog, where the signal degrades as distance from the tower increases.

There are four air interfaces that are important. These are basically digital languages, and they use different programs to turn the analog signal into a bunch of ones and zeros.

One example is CDMA, which Sprint and Verizon use.

Cingular and T-Mobile use GSM.

If you have your favorite Cingular phone and you walk into Verizon and want to keep your phone, but use their network, you're out of luck. It doesn't work, because different digital languages are used on the two networks.

Why is this so complicated? It's because the FCC allows these different technologies to compete with each other. In Europe they specified that everyone use GSM, so there you can keep your phone when you change services.

A third digital language is iDEN. These are the cell phones that do the walkie-talkie function through Nextel. That technology was invented by Motorola and is now used by Nextel. Sprint and Nextel have combined, so now Sprint-Nextel can sell you a phone that functions like a cell phone or a walkie-talkie. This is used by Sprint and SouthernLINC.

Q. If two people are talking on cell phones, why are they both billed?
A. The US is one of the few places in the world where there is no law specifying that the caller pays for the phone call. So the carriers here can bill both the caller and the receiver. The FCC is looking at a regulation called "Calling Party Pays". That would make it just like landline service, but it hasn't happened yet.

So that's the difference between digital languages, and the phones that use them.

All of these digital languages can potentially interfere with your hearing aid or cochlear implant. The buzz from the different phones can sound different, and various components within phones can produce different sounding buzzes, as well.

Another digital language is "3G", which is the third generation system. The problem with 3G is that everyone has their own flavor, and it hasn't merged yet. So that might happen in 4G.

Cell phones come in a variety of shapes, including standard looking phones, flip phones, candy bar phones, sliders, hybrid sliders (slides and flips) QWERTY devices, etc. And that's just the current Motorola product line.

The shape of the phone affects whether or not it interferes with your hearing aid or CI. Because there are so many shapes, if one phone doesn't work well for you, a different one may. Even devices that look very similar may be very different internally. And different phones have different features. So you need to decide what features you want and get that phone.

Wireless Accessibility Regulations

TTY Mandate - Wireless phones have to be capable of allowing TTYs signals to pass through to complete 911 calls. The 1G phones (analog) did this just fine. But the 2G phones came along and tried to convert the TTY tones to ones and zeros. The problem is that the equations that produce the ones and zeroes were developed for speech, and they don't work well on TTY tones. So the 2G phones didn't handle them well. They produced garbage, and the FCC said that the phones had to work with TTYs.

Section 508 - This is primarily for the government. This section says that items purchased by the government must be accessible.

Section 255 - This is similar to Section 508, and is sometimes referred to as the ADA for telecommunications. It says that you have to make telecommunications equipment accessible for people with disabilities, where it's readily achievable to do so.

Hearing Aid Compatibility (HAC) Mandate - You may see the chili pepper logo on the boxes. These have numbers that specify how compatible this particular phone is with hearing aids and telecoils.

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The Big 25th Anniversary Sale at Harris Communications
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This year, Harris Communications is celebrating 25 years of being in business. To show appreciation to our customers, every week we will have selected products 25% off!

This week, receive a 25% discount on the TV EARS Original Headset (TVEars-1). TV Ears is a wireless headset specifically designed to clarify voices and deliver movie-theater sound without disturbing others. Hurry, this sale ends January 25, 2007.

Check back every week for more amazing sales! For more information, go to
http://www.harriscomm.com/link/?www.harriscomm.com?sr=hlw
or contact us at mailto:info@harriscomm.com
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- Article 2: HLAA ED Admonishes CSD
By Terry Portis, Ed.D., Executive Director, HLAA
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Editor: Kudos to Terry Portis! I'm thrilled to see him taking a stand on the claims by various organizations that they support hard of hearing people by providing sign language services. Here are his comments regarding the recent CSD claims that VRS supports 28 million people. For more of his thoughts, please point your browser to Terry's blog (www.lightkeepersjournal.org).

These comments are reprinted with Terry's kind permission.

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January 10th, 2007

Last month at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) meeting, a democratic commissioner and a republican commissioner both quoted President Ronald Reagan. Given that this is in vogue, I decided to pull a quote myself "There they go again."

I received a press release a couple of weeks ago announcing that Communications Services for the Deaf (CSD) is going to spin off the video interpreting services into a for-profit company. CSD has helped a lot of people, and provided many services. Their press release, unfortunately, contained a huge mistake.

The CSD press release stated: "VRS offers the nation's 28 million deaf and hard of hearing individuals the ability to communicate using sign language when making telephone calls." As I have stated many times, the most generous estimates are that 500,000 people utilize sign language to communicate in our country.

Every time an organization states or implies that 28 million people use sign language, it has a negative impact for the more than 97% of people with hearing loss who do not use sign language. It hurts our advocacy efforts to increase services that really will help the majority of the [people] in this country with hearing loss.

When I point out errors like the one in the CSD press release, I am inevitably called an audist, or someone will say that I am "anti-sign language." All of this is done to draw attention away from the facts. Some organizations or agencies have responded in recent years by adding "and hard of hearing" to their names or mission statements. They did not change, or offer any new services, but made the change to keep the government money flowing in.

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- Article 3: Bilateral Cochlear Implants - Audiological Perspective
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Joan Hewitt, Au.D. discussed the audiological aspects of bilateral cochlear implants at the January meeting of the San Diego Cochlear Implant Group. Her practice has 18 bilateral patients between the ages of two years and nineteen years old. Her presentation focused on what they have learned from these patients, so she began by providing some information about them.

Patient age at first implantation ranged from one year to fifteen years and ten months. Age at second implantation ranged from one year and four months to nineteen years. The time between implants ranged from three months to six years and five months. (Note that this means none of the patients received simultaneous implants.) The patients have had their second implant from two weeks (and not yet activated) to two years and eleven months, with many just under a year. All patients are prelingually deaf.

Dr. Hewitt next discussed some of the limitations of traditional audiological testing and recommended changes that she feels would greatly increase the value of these tests. She focused on the following tests:
1. Sound field warble tone testing
2. Detection of Ling sounds
3. Sentences in noise (e.g. HINT) testing
4. Speech discrimination testing

The sound field warble tone test is the test used to construct an audiogram. It determines the volume required for various tones to be detectable by the patient. It therefore measures access to sound, rather than intelligibility or understanding. Dr. Hewitt described one patient who was being tested after getting a new mapping. His warble tone test showed that his hearing ranged from 20dB to 25dB across the spectrum, which is excellent! But subsequent testing revealed a speech discrimination score of 12%, compared to 80% with the previous map. The excellent results indicated by the warble tone testing disguised a serious problem with the new map!

Ling sounds include some of the sounds that make up speech (phonemes). One might think that they would provide a better indication of speech intelligibility than warble tones, but that's not necessarily the case. The problem with Ling sounds remains the same. They indicate access to sound, rather than intelligibility. One patient, for example, was able to detect many of the sounds at a low volume. Unfortunately, the patient was unable to differentiate the sounds, even at a higher volume.

Sentence testing provides a better measure of speech intelligibility, but suffers from the fact that it also relies a lot on a patient's language ability. Dr. Hewitt believes that language ability and hearing ability contribute about equally to these scores. One patient with awesome language skills was able to score 90% on the HINT test, while scoring only 36% on a speech discrimination (individual words) test. This indicates that she was able to reconstruct the sentences with very little acoustic information.

Another patient had the opposite experience, getting no sentences correct despite a speech discrimination score of 50%. The problem was the child's poor language skills, which caused him to order words incorrectly, form tenses incorrectly, etc. These errors resulted in his missing every sentence, even though he obviously understood them.

Word discrimination tests have a couple of problems. The first is that the test that is administered is not always age-appropriate to the patient. If the word list is intended for a much younger child, an older patient will probably do much better on it than he would on a more age-appropriate list. A second issue is that discrimination is often not tested at various speech volumes. A patient who scores around 70% for normal volumes may score 0 at quiet volume. For a CI user, such disparity in scores probably means that the map should be adjusted.

Dr. Hewitt believes that a few modifications and additions would make these tests more effective in evaluating the hearing of CI patients.

One modification would be to test all phonemes, rather than just the Ling sounds. This test would still be measuring access rather than intelligibility, but would at least indicate the accessibility of all sounds that comprise speech.

A second modification would be to add a speech reception threshold test, which would be a better intelligibility indicator.

Finally, speech discrimination testing should always be done at low, medium, and high volumes.

Dr. Hewitt spent the remainder of her presentation considering some common questions from patients who get a second implant.

Q. I just love my current map on my first implant. Can I use the same one on my second implant?
A. No. Even if your second implant hardware is identical to your first, it will require a different map.

A related topic is the volume setting of the two implants. It's common for a patient to report, after she's been using both implants for a couple of weeks or so, that they're too loud. Virtually all patients want the volume of their second implant reduced, but the correct response is almost always to reduce the volume of the first implant. The reason for this is binaural summation - the brain adds the sounds from both ears. Because the first CI was programmed when there was no input from the other ear, the volume was set without accounting for binaural summation. When the second CI is activated, the map of the first should be adjusted.

Q. How will the new implant sound?
A. Experiences differ, but it will probably not sound like the first one did. But it will also probably not sound "normal". Patients often forget how the first implant initially sounded, and are initially disappointed in the sound of the second.

Q. Should I not use my first implant while I'm getting used to the second?
A. There is a lot of disagreement about this. We do NOT recommend removing the first implant while you get used to the second. It's just too hard to function at work or school without the first one. And we think it's important to use your implant every day. But we also think that you should practice with just your second implant for at least a short time every day.

Q. How should I practice with the second implant?
A. Go back to the very beginning, like you did with your first implant. (Again, patients often forget how far back the beginning is!) We have found that patients generally acclimate to the second implant quite rapidly.

Q. What second implant benefits can be documented?
A. We generally find improved understand with the use of two implants over the use of either implant alone. The improvement seems to occur even when a patient's results with the second implant alone are disappointing. The most substantial improvements are in noisy situations.

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- Article 4: Short Takes
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Editor: Here are our picks of some additional stories that you may find interesting. For more, please point your browser to: http://www.hearinglossweb.com/news/curr.htm

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Deafness and the Riddle of Identity

But the "not deaf enough" issue is alive and well among deaf scholars, students, and activists. Even though Fernandes may have exaggerated that accusation to bolster her own position, and even though her detractors denied its relevance, the charge formed at least part of the subtext of students' anger and is a topic of debate within the deaf community. Now that passions have been spent and an interim president, Robert R. Davila, appointed, it might be useful to examine what deaf identity might be and how that identity fits in with current notions of other identities based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=j1kwykr398gz88fxgrdp8tj6n7wldcny

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A comprehensive comparison of cochlear implants available in the United States

http://dus28.grange.psu.edu/CIChoices/CIComparison.htm

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Hearing Loss Suits Hit Siren Manufacturer

A firefighter from North Arlington is among 400 in the state -- and nearly 5,000 nationwide -- who are suing a national siren manufacturer, alleging that exposure to the device's noise left them with hearing damage . . . . All are seeking damages from Federal Signal Corp., an Illinois-based siren manufacturer, and four New Jersey companies that distribute municipal fire equipment. DeJesus, a 25-year veteran of the Hoboken Fire Department, claims the siren "emits intense noise at levels which, over time, are capable of causing permanent injury to human hearing." Repeated exposure to the sound damaged his hearing, he alleges.

http://cms.firehouse.com/content/article/article.jsp?sectionId=46&id=52982

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- Classifieds
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Two online stores and two employment opportunities appear in this issue. (Ads appear after this brief table of contents.)

WCI. Your Single Source for Assistive Technology
IT'S A NEW YEAR FOR SAVINGS AT WCI!
http://www.weitbrecht.com

Potomac Technology. Everything You Need Under One Roof!
SALE! SALE! SALE!
http://www.potomactech.com

Employment Opportunity 1
Various Positions
GLAD
Los Angeles

Employment Opportunity 2
Executive Director
CalCLAD
San Leandro, CA

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WCI. Your Single Source for Assistive Technology
IT'S A NEW YEAR FOR SAVINGS AT WCI!
http://www.weitbrecht.com
-------------------

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Potomac Technology. Everything You Need Under One Roof!
SALE! SALE! SALE!
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Celebrate News Year's Day all month! During January, Potomac Technology offers special savings. All Signalers are 15% off. Whatever your needs, we have the right combination of signaling products for an apartment, home, college dorm room or office.

The Sonic Shaker Portable Travel alarm clock is only $21.95 (regularly $29.95). It comes complete with batteries, pillow strap with clasp, and protective travel case. But that's not all. Get FREE SHIPPING on orders over $100.00. Just call us at 1-800-433-2838 (V/TTY) or visit us online at http://www.potomactech.com (use code PTECH107 when ordering Sonic Shaker SBP100).

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Potomac Technology. Everything You Need Under One Roof!

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Employment Opportunity 1
Various Positions
GLAD
Los Angeles
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GLAD is an Affirmative Action Employer with equal opportunity for men, women and people with disabilities. For more information on the following positions, please go to: www.gladinc.org. The status of all positions is: Regular, Full-time, Non-Exempt, Full Fringe Benefits unless otherwise noted. All positions are open until filled.

* Building Manager - Los Angeles, CA
* Regional Director - Riverside, CA
* Community Interpreter - Los Angeles, CA
* Mexican Sign Language Interpreter - Riverside. CA
* Job Developer/Interpreter - Norwalk, CA
* Community Health Educator-Los Angeles, CA
* Grant Writer - Los Angeles, CA

If interested for any of these positions then please submit resume and application to:

Jeff Fetterman
Human Resources Specialist
Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness, Inc.
2222 Laverna Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90041
V/TDD: (323) 550-4207
Fax #: (323)550-4204
E-mail: jfetterman@gladinc.org

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Employment Opportunity 2
Executive Director
CalCLAD
San Leandro, CA
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The California Center for Law and the Deaf seeks candidates for Executive Director. The position will be open as of July 1, 2007.

CalCLAD was established in 1978 and is the first and only non-profit full-service legal services corporation in America devoted exclusively to serving deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Its mission is to protect and advance their legal rights to enable them to live independent, productive lives, with full access to the rights, privileges, entitlements, services, educational and employment opportunities available to others. CalCLAD is located in San Leandro, CA, and provides services statewide.

For more information about duties, qualifications, and how to apply, please go to www.deaflaw.org or submit an inquiry to calclad@deaflaw.org.

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- Contact Information and Disclaimers
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