Wireless Hearing Interfaces (Including Bluetooth)
You've probably heard of Bluetooth by now. It's a wireless protocol that
enables any appropriately equipped devices to talk to each other. Examples
of particular interest to people with hearing loss are hearing aids, cell
phones, FM systems, etc. It probably won't be too long until all these
devices interface seamlessly!
July 2004 - Are your hearing aids bluetooth-enabled? Would you like
them to be? It's not as hard as you think; anyone who's reasonably handy
with a soldering iron can build a hearing aid
bluetooth adapter!
July 2004 - The previous article talked about enabling your hearing
aids to be bluetooth compatible. This article talks about
using bluetooth to build a much cheaper
and more powerful hearing aid!
January 2006 - The Future of Wireless Devices in
Hearing Health Care
February 2007 - Bluetooth
Headsets Remove Hearing Aid Stigma
April 2007 - Oticon
Epoq wireless capabilities provide binaural processing and more
July 2007 -
NFMI Promises Huge Leap in Hearing Aid Capabilities
December 2007 -
Wireless transmission of speech and data to, from, and
between hearing aids
December 2007 -
Hearing Aids and Wireless Protocols
December 2007 -
Assessing the feasibility of Bluetooth in hearing
rehabilitation
January 2009 - Bluetooth and Hearing Aids: Ready
for prime time?
April 2009 - Oticon ConnectLine(tm) Enhances
Wireless Connectivity
April 2009 -
Binaural hearing on the telephone with Bluetooth
March 2010 - Digital Wireless Hearing Aids, Part 1: A
Primer
April 2010 - GN ReSound Announces New Wireless
Connectivity Solution
July 2010 - Fewer Wires, Less Complexity, and More
Connections: The New Challenge for Wireless Hearing Instruments
October 2010 - A new method for wireless connectivity in
hearing aids
October 2010 - Siemens MiniTek Offers Robust Wireless
Connectivity
December 2010 - Five Myths About Digital Wireless
Hearing Aid Technology
April 2011 - The World of Wireless
July 2011 - Wireless Hearing Aid Technology -
Misconceptions & Facts
August 2011 - Digital Wireless Hearing Aids, Part 3:
Audiological Benefits
More on this and related
topics
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July 2004
OK, I admit it sounds a bit techie, but I looked at the article and
think it's easily doable for anyone who's reasonably handy with a
soldering iron. With the current and future batch of Bluetooth enabled
devices, having your hearing aids bluetooth enabled will be very cool!
If anyone is willing to give it a go, please let me know; if more
than one of you have at it, I'll put you all in touch and you can help
each other. And I'd love to see a follow-up article reporting successful
projects!
To get started, point your browser to: http://www.gfern.com/btha/btha.html
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January
2006
Editor:
Hearing Review has an article how wireless technology is affecting and
will affect hearing aids in the next several years. Here's an excerpt
and a link to the complete story.
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"Wireless is here to
stay and has the potential to significantly affect the provision of
hearing care. Hearing aids equipped with wireless systems will solve
many of the most common issues encountered by hearing aid
wearers—telephone use, noise, and listening problems associated with
distance and reverberation. They may also someday enhance binaural
processing and offer a means by which a hearing aid can learn how best
to deal with the ever changing acoustic environment. Ultimately,
wireless devices may foster the convergence of the normal-hearing and
hard-of-hearing markets and potentially redefine the way hearing care is
provided. It’s an exciting time; stay tuned." Full
Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
February
2007
The
old stigma of wearing a hearing aid vanishes with the cell-phone era of
ear-based devices for anyone.
When
people see the device on Jim Haniacek's ear, they correctly assume that
it's connected to his cell phone. What they don't know is that it's
connected to his hearing aids too. "It does look like a
Bluetooth," the 26-year-old private investigator said. "No one
believes I have hearing aids." That he now has to convince people
that he has hereditary hearing loss comes as a relief to Haniacek, a
resident of Chicago's West Lawn neighborhood. He was concerned about the
stigma of wearing hearing aids after he was diagnosed about a year ago.
Full
Story
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Oticon,
Inc. today introduced Oticon Epoq, the first hearing instrument designed
with wireless connectivity at its core to address the two most common
listening challenges for people with hearing loss. A proprietary binaural
high speed wireless technology enables a pair of Epoq hearing devices to
communicate at data transfer speeds 100 faster than hearing instruments
now on the market. This real-time connectivity with voices and other
sounds in the immediate listening environment provides accurate,
stereophonic auditory information that is in synch with a user's visual
experience. The same wireless connectivity also enables easy, hands-free
access to the world of electronically transmitted sounds from
Bluetooth-enabled cell phones and other popular electronic devices such as
MP3 players and computers. Full
Story
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July 2007
NFMI wireless technology is rapidly expanding into
applications such as two-way radios and hands-free mobile phone earpieces,
and some hearing instruments.1 NFMI works on the principle of magnetic
induction, which is somewhat similar to a telecoil. With NFMI, however,
communication can be two-way and the signal can be encoded for security
purposes. Two devices or components each generate a special magnetic field,
and communication takes place via an interaction between the fields. NFMI is
ideal for incorporation within hearing instruments because the components
are very small and the power needs are minuscule. When active, the NFMI
circuit in the Oticon RISE platform increases the power consumption of the
chip by only 10%. Additionally, the magnetic field of the system does not
extend beyond approximately 3 feet, which ensures secure encoded
communication with a greatly reduced susceptibility to interference.
Full Story
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December 2007
Here's a great article on the wireless
communications between hearing aids and other devices. It includes a good
history of the telecoil and how it developed, the incorporation of FM
receivers into hearing aids, and the ongoing transition to digital
communications technology (which is different from digital hearing aid
technology). The article goes on to consider Bluetooth and Near Field
Magnetic Induction (NFMI), which is the "magic" behind the Oticon Epoq
system. Finally, the authors consider what sorts of advances we might expect
in the future.
Full Story
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December 2007
Here's another article from the Hearing Journal
special issue on Wireless Technology (November 2007). This one includes a
pretty good historical perspective on the development of telecoils and how
they influenced the development of telephones. It also covers more recent
innovations, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Full Story
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December 2007
With its inherent features of security, portability,
robustness, low power, and low cost, Bluetooth is also an obvious candidate
for applications in hearing instruments. As this paper will make clear,
however, practical limitations with the current Bluetooth standard are
limiting its application to hearing aids, and Bluetooth technology will not
become accessible to the majority of hearing aid wearers until these
limitations are resolved.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
April 2009
Every few years a new improvement comes along that
truly makes a difference in people's lives. One such innovation is the
Bluetooth(r)-compatible, remote control unit that relays incoming telephone
calls directly to the wearer's hearing instruments. Several manufacturers
offer these units and their capacities depend on the specific model. At the
time this was written, four wireless "relays" (as they will generically be
called here) with such capabilities are available: Epoq from Oticon, iCom
from Phonak, sonicBLU from Sonic Innovations and Tek(tm) from Siemens. These
relays all operate uniquely and have a variety of features, such as volume
control, tone control, etc. But here we will be discussing only one feature:
the ability of these units to allow wearers to talk on the telephone while
hearing binaurally.
Full Story
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March 2010
Digital signal processing has opened up innovative
ways where an audio signal can be manipulated. This flexibility allows the
development of algorithms to improve the sound quality of the audio signal
and opens up new ways in which audio signals can be stored and transmitted.
Whereas FM has been the standard of analog wireless transmission used in the
hearing aid world, digital is fast becoming the new norm for wireless
transmission. This paper takes a behind-the-scenes look at some of the basic
components of a wireless digital hearing aid that transmits audio data so
that readers may appreciate the complexity of such a system.
Full Story
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July 2010
Digital wireless features in hearing instruments can
potentially increase hearing instrument utility-a key factor in high
customer satisfaction. Although this potential is recognized by both end
users and hearing care professionals, barriers to the widespread use of
wireless systems are often related to the perceived complexity of the
systems. A stable and clear-sounding connectivity to TV and cell phones is
viewed as the most desired by end users.
Full Story
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By Jason A. Galster
October 2010
In this era of wireless connectivity, the way we use
technology to interact and communicate with each other has changed our
perception of the world around us. Happily, hearing aids are no longer an
exception, as these devices have become more than just sophisticated signal
processors designed to amplify speech. For many patients with hearing loss,
a hearing aid is not only a personal communication device, but also a
gateway to media connectivity and greater convenience in communication.
Today's digital wireless protocols allow for wireless communication between
hearing aids and from hearing aids to numerous forms of media devices. Some
of these offerings use frequencies that allow for far-field signal
transmission, while others focus on near-field communication. A wide array
of frequencies is available for wireless data and audio transmission; the
transmission and reception of these signals is performed by small radios
embedded in the hearing aids and remote devices. This article will focus on
the wireless communication ability of currently available hearing aids,
which, at the time of this publication, function in one of three different
frequency bands: 3- to 15-MHz near-field magnetic induction; 2.4-GHz
industrial scientific medical band; and 900-MHz industrial scientific
medical band.
Full Story
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October 2010
Despite recent progress in increasing the percentage
of hearing aids with telecoils, there are still millions of units that do
not contain telecoils. The issue, especially for smaller hearing aids, is
that there just isn't room for a telecoils. Siemens has addressed that issue
for their hearing aids with the advent of the MiniTek, a combination
gateway/remote control that also contains a telecoils! Oh, and a Direct
Audio Input (DAI). It only works with Siemens wireless hearing aids (and not
all of those), but it does appear to offer the full range of wireless (and
even wired) communications options.
Full Story
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December 2010
Hearing instruments with digital wireless features
have been around for a number of years. Initially, the wireless technology
was used for the convenience of managing user controls on bilaterally fit
devices simultaneously, but functionality has been added to facilitate
hearing instrument use in multiple listening situations, such as when
watching television or talking on the phone.
As new digital wireless hearing instrument systems
continue to be introduced, confusion understandably arises as to how these
systems compare. The first systems were based on near-field magnetic
induction (NFMI), while the most recent generation of digital wireless
systems use radio frequency (RF). Both of these technologies offer benefits
and trade-offs: NFMI is quickly and relatively easily implemented in hearing
instruments, as the technology is similar to the well-established telecoil;
RF is challenging for manufacturers to achieve, but allows far-field
transmission directly from sound sources to the hearing instruments.
This article will address some of the misconceptions
that have surfaced as more manufacturers introduce digital wireless hearing
instrument systems.
Full Story
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April 2011
Wireless systems are an alphabet soup of acronyms,
technologies, and devices. But hearing aid manufacturers are navigating the
waters, implementing wireless technologies to improve the sound, look, and
convenience of today's hearing instruments. Hearing aids require a lot of
technology in a small amount of space. "We have a circuit, a microphone, a
loudspeaker, a receiver, batteries, maybe two microphones for
directionality, an antenna to receive these signals-behind-the-ear
instruments can only be so big, and there's not a lot of real estate in most
custom hearing aids," says Thomas Powers, PhD, vice president for audiology
and product management at Siemens Hearing Instruments, Piscataway, NJ. The
cramped accommodations have created a challenge for manufacturers developing
hearing instruments that incorporate wireless technologies.
Full Story
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July 2011
Interview with Jenny Groth, M.A., Director of
Audiology Communication, ReSound
CAROLYN SMAKA: Hi Jenny, thanks for your time today.
What do you do for ReSound?
JENNY GROTH: I'm an audiologist and I've been with
the company for 15 years in various capacities, mostly in our clinical
research department. We have two clinical research sites: one in Denmark and
one in Glenview, Illinois. I head up the Glenview site.
SMAKA: Great. Thanks for talking to me about
wireless hearing aid technology. One misconception I hear both from
professionals and consumers lies around Bluetooth. "Which hearing aids are
Bluetooth?" is a common question. Where do you think the confusion comes
from?
Full Story
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August 2011
In two previous articles, we provided a description
of wireless technologies1 and the rationale behind the WidexLink platform
used in the Clear440 hearing aids.2 This proprietary wireless platform
exchanges information (audio and data) between hearing aids and connects
with audio devices in the wearers' environments-all achieved through
applications of both short-range and long-range wireless transmissions. For
the dispensing professionals, the real question is how WidexLink technology
may accelerate the wearers' use and acceptance of hearing aids. This may be
best appreciated with knowing what audiological features are realized with
the application of WidexLink and how they may benefit end users.
Full Story
