Unusual Hearing Aids
You probably already know about behind the ear hearing aids, in the ear
hearing aids, etc. If you're exceptionally knowledgeable, you may even know
about conduction aids, CROS aids, and implantable aids. But I bet you'll see
some things here that you don't know about!
May
2000 - And if that isn't enough, have you ever thought about getting Hearing Glasses??
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!
Feb 2006 -
Angel Ears Disguised Hearing Aid for Women
April
2006 - Varibel,
the glasses that hear
April
2006 - Solar
Powered Hearing Aids for Unreached People
April
2007 - Israel's
Audiodent invents hearing aid for the mouth
May
2007 - Wirear - a HiTech and Stylish Hearing Aid
Dec
2007 -
Vintage Ear Trumpets
Apr 2008
-
Lyric hearing aid costs up to $3600 per year!
May 2008 -
InSound's new hearing aid hidden inside ear
May 2008 -
Solar-powered hearing aids help poor deaf folk
May 2008 -
Audiologists can now fit the InSound Lyric Hearing Aid
September 2008 - Lyric Hearing Aid Available in
Florida
January 2009 -
Re-evaluating the Efficacy of
Frequency Transposition
May 2009 -
A New Hearing Aid Class: The First 100% Invisible
Extended-Wear Hearing Aid
July 2009 - Does Loud 'N Clear Live Up to Ads' Claims?
July 2009 - What's the newest hearing aid? The iPhone!
Sept 2009 - Solar Hearing Aid
October
2009 - SoundByte(tm) Hearing System Relies on your
Teeth!
November
2009 - Improvements Coming for Tactile Hearing Aids?
December
2009 - Dog gets $3,000 wireless hearing aid
December 2009 - Swim-Proof Hearing Aids to Get Test
January 2009 - Is your next hearing aid an iPhone
or iPod?
May 2010 - First Peer Reviewed Article on
SoundBite(TM) Hearing System Features Preliminary Evaluation
May 2010 - A Hearing Aid That Uses Bones to Conduct Sound
September 2010 - Candidacy and Fitting Protocols for a
24/7 Hearing Device
November 2010 - The Economics of a 24/7 Hearing Aid
November 2010 - Oticon Medical Bone Conduction Sound
Processor
December 2010 - Solar Hearing Aid for Developing
Countries
January 2011 - SoundBite(tm) Hearing System Receives
FDA Clearance for Treatment of Single Sided Deafness
February 2011 - Real-World Safety Experience with Lyric
Hearing Aid
February 2011 - Turn your iPhone into a Hearing Aid
March 2011 - Implantable Bone Conduction
Hearing Aids
March 2011 - Sonitus Medical Receives European CE Mark
for SoundBite(tm) Hearing System
March 2011 - New Hearing Aid Resembles iPod MP3
Player
March 2011 - Invisible Extended Wear Hearing Aids
July 2011 - SoundBite Hearing System Approved for
Conductive Hearing Loss
December 2011 - Panasonic Expands on Hearing
Instrument Lineup
More on this and related
topics
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
April
2006
Today
a new hearing aid in the form of a pair of glasses was unveiled. These
hearing-glasses are called 'Varibel' and offer older people the chance
to stay active longer - free from the aesthetically unpleasing and
technologically limited traditional hearing aids. Delft University of
Technology in the Netherlands originally developed the hearing-glasses.
Varibel developed these glasses into a consumer product in partnership
with Philips, Frame Holland, the design agencies MMID and Verhoeven, and
others. Full
Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
April
2006
[Editor:
You won't believe the price!]
The
world's established hearing aid industry produces hearing aids that are
NOT suitable for most of the world's 250 million hearing impaired
people. These hearing aids
require a continual supply of disposable batteries, which are seldom
available or affordable to poor people.
Beyond batteries, conventional aids are not built for rugged
service. In remote Asian,
African and Latin American villages the lifetime of ordinary hearing
aids is measured in months.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
April
2007
The idea that you can hear sounds from vibrations transmitted through your
teeth is nothing new. Long before composer Beethoven held a wooden baton
between his teeth and pressed it to his piano to listen to the notes,
inventors have been experimenting with a variety of hearing aids devised
from wooden boards held to the teeth. Imaginative though these were, up to
now, there has never been a practical solution. Audiodent, a small Israeli
start-up based in Omer, near Beersheva, is about to change all that. The
company has developed an innovative new hearing aid that clips easily
inside the mouth, using the teeth and jawbone to transmit sound to the
brain. Full
Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May 2007
Ruined your hearing with too much loud music? Take a
peek into the future with Wirear, a fashion-conscious hearing-aid concept
by Australian student designer Sun Kyung Sunwoo. She noticed a number of
problems with current hearing aids, and attempts to overcome those faults
while designing a hearing aid that looks more like a piece of jewelry than
a techno-device. First,
she's improved the sound quality by locating the microphone in front of
the ear, using the sound-gathering shape of the folds of the ear to
achieve the most natural sound fidelity. The speaker is placed within the
ear canal, also improving the sound while reducing echo. As a result, this
design has the benefits of both in-the-ear and behind-the-ear hearing aid
designs, as well as reduced feedback Full
Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 2007
People have always lost their hearing
with age, but before there were hearing aids and cochlear implants, there
were ear trumpets. And ear trumpet is pretty much exactly what it sounds
like (a cone whose small end fits in the ear canal) and serves to better
collect and amplify sound into the ear. A person hard of hearing would hold
it to their ear as someone else would speak (or yell) into the large end of
the trumpet. The earliest description of an ear trumpet was in the early
1600s.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
April 2008
But now scientists have come up with a different
kind of hearing aid. While the device, called the Lyric, is being used in
only 500 patients, it appears to have overcome many of the problems
associated with traditional hearing aids - without the expense and
uncertainty of surgery and anesthesia. The Lyric, made by InSound Medical of
Newark, Calif., is hidden deep inside the ear canal, just four millimeters
(about one-sixth of an inch) from the ear drum. While doctors for years have
been implanting hearing devices in the middle ear, the Lyric is not an
implant: it can be removed with a small magnet. It is worn 24 hours a day,
and its batteries last one to four months.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May 2008
Barbara Rosenberg is an early adopter when it comes
to hearing aids - her vanity, she says, keeps her on the cutting edge. When
she first needed help hearing about 10 years ago, the San Francisco resident
opted for the latest, most discreet technology, a device that nested in the
ear canal. Now, she's moved on to the newest advancement: the first
extended-wear hearing aid, virtually invisible to others, which can be worn
24 hours a day up to four months. "They're not custom-made, but they can be
adjusted to the shape of your ear," Rosenberg said of the 15-millimeter
hearing aid developed by InSound Medical Inc. of Newark. "I was fitted with
them and have been ecstatic with them ever since." The nonsurgical device -
called Lyric - is placed just 4 millimeters from the eardrum, hiding it from
view. It's designed to resolve common problems associated with conventional
aids, including feedback and difficulty hearing certain frequency ranges.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May 2008
It's a long way from Montreal to Otse, a speck of a
town in the backcountry of Botswana. But Howard Weinstein, 57, is glad he
made the journey. When he first arrived in this parched community of 3,500
at the edge of the Kalahari desert five years ago, the retired Canadian
business executive knew it would be no holiday. All the same, Weinstein just
took a deep breath; all he wanted was a place where he could put his life
back together. The civic group World University Service of Canada had sent
him to Otse. His mission was to set up a company that would provide
affordable hearing aids to partially deaf Africans. Just one problem: in
African terms there was no such thing as an affordable hearing aid. The
people in Otse didn't seem able to afford much of anything at all. "My
office was a single room with a couple chairs and no staff," Weinstein
recalls. "We were starting from zero." It was exactly what he was looking
for. Full
Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May 2008
The InSound Medical Lyric deep-fitting disposable
hearing aid has received from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) an
extension of its indication for use statement so that appropriately trained
audiologists and dispensing professionals, in addition to ENT physicians,
can place the new hearing device in a patient's ear canal. Previously, only
ENTs were allowed to place the device in the ear canal. Although the new
indication opens the door to audiologists' and dispensing professionals'
placement of the device without medical supervision, InSound Medical's VP of
Marketing Susan Whichard notes that the company's strategy is to work first
with those audiologists and dispensing professionals who maintain close
professional relationships with ENTs. She says that the company intends to
transition changes in the placement of the device in appropriate stages.
For example, a dispensing professional might decide to work with an ENT when
performing new Lyric fittings, then progress to doing the majority of the
replacement fittings and/or new fittings him/herself.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May 2009
Lyric is a new extended-wear, deep-canal, disposable
device, offering 24/7 listening capabilities and 100% invisibility relative
to cosmetics. It is also designed to provide solutions to many of the
drawbacks encountered with traditional hearing aids, with significant
acoustic, practical, and cosmetic benefits. George1 indicates that only
21.4% of the estimated 28 million hearing-impaired Americans utilize
amplification regularly. Although advancements in hearing instruments have
improved customer satisfaction, issues with sound quality, feedback, limited
frequency response, occlusion, pain or irritation in the fitting, moisture,
social stigma, and cosmetic issues persist.2 Additionally, there are hassles
of hearing aid ownership include routine daily insertion and removal,
replacement of batteries, telephone and earphone usage, wind noise, problems
associated with cerumen, and migration of the instrument. Traditional
devices are restricted in use during daily activities such as sleeping,
showering, or exercising. These and other practical frustrations are
constant reminders of one's hearing loss and communication deficit. InSound
Medical has developed a new category of hearing device designed specifically
to address these issues.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
July 2009
If you're having trouble hearing, you might be
tempted to buy a new product called the Loud 'N Clear. It promises to help
you hear better and even hear things you might not ordinarily be able to.
But, can the Loud 'N Clear really do all that its ads claim? NewsChannel 5
Investigates put it to the test, and consumer investigator Jennifer Kraus
found the answer is loud and clear. The TV ads claim you'll never miss
another word with the Loud 'N Clear, a small device that looks like a cell
phone ear piece.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
July 2009
We've still got a ways to go before we start seeing
glucose monitors and blood pressure pumps pop up with iPhone support, but
some health and disability-related apps are already beginning to emerge. One
of the first is a new application called soundAMP (iTunes Link), a hearing
aid application that was just released on the App Store, and is available
for $9.99. The application is pretty straightforward: it takes everything
that reaches the phone's microphone, and makes it louder. You can manually
adjust just how powerful you'd like the sound amplification to be, and can
also choose from several different equalizer settings to specify which
frequencies you'd like boosted most. There are also a number of handy
features for repeating something if you missed it the first time: a button
at the top of the app will replay the last five seconds of everything you've
heard, and there's also a button that lets you listen through a 30 second
buffer of recent audio.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sept 2009
Solar hearing aids have been around for a while, and
they make a lot of sense for users who can't afford or don't have access to
an ongoing battery supply. Here's the latest incarnation from the folks at
the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. Note that the website comes up in
Portuguese, but clicking on the American flag in the upper right corner
delivers an English version.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
November 2009
Tactile aids, which translate sound waves into
vibrations that can be felt by the skin, have been used for decades by
people with severe/profound hearing loss to enhance speech/language
development and improve speechreading. Although multichannel cochlear
implants have gained the lion's share of attention and usage over the years
by demonstrating their superiority in word recognition and speech
understanding without the need to speechread,1 tactile aids continue to
inspire research and may be undergoing a technological renewal. In 2006,
Iranian researchers published a study on the use of tactile aids, along with
rehabilitation and training, in patients within the Department of
Otolaryngology at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences.2 They designed
four educational stages--detection, beginning pattern perception,
recognition of speech, and comprehension of words--to check the improvement
of subjects who used one-, two- and seven-channel tactile aids. Patients
with the seven-channel tactile aids were able to successfully pass through
all four stages, leading the researchers to conclude, "Tactile aids are well
accepted by the patients with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss
who do not benefit from usual hearing aids."
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 2009
Timmy the service dog has become the second dog in
the nation to receive a $3,000 wireless hearing aid. A 101/2-year-old
Springer-Labrador-Bassett, Timmy received the hearing aid from the
University of Cincinnati, according to his owner, Neil Young, of Young's
Funny Farm. Funds were raised from the region to pay for the hearing aid
Timmy wears in his left ear. "We raised close to what we needed," Young
said. Some Kiwanis clubs donated money, and a local foundation, which wants
to remain anonymous, gave $2,000. Timmy was fitted Dec. 16 with the hearing
aid, which was custom-made for his ear. He was placed in a soundproof booth
to test his hearing with and without the hearing aid. All the results were
positive, Young said.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 2009
They're not your grandpa's hearing aids. Today's
newest models range from the completely invisible - it sits deep in the ear
canal for months at a time - to Bluetooth-enabled gadgets that open cell
phones and iPods for hearing-aid users. Now the maker of that invisible
hearing aid is going a step further - attempting a swim-proof version. About
60 swimmers begin testing a next-generation Lyric next month, to see if
stronger coatings can withstand at least three swims a week, allowing the
device to repel the water that short-circuits regular hearing aids. If so,
expect to see it marketed to active seniors who increasingly find the pool a
gentler form of exercise than pounding the pavement.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May 2010
One day in 2006, stuck in bumper-to-bumper Bay Area
traffic, Amir Abolfathi had a eureka moment. Formerly vice president of R&D
for Invisalign, a company known for transparent dental braces, he had
recently been chatting with a friend who was working on hearing aids.
Abolfathi knew that bone was a good sound conductor. What if he could
somehow make a removable oral hearing aid-one that could channel sound from
wearers' teeth to their ear through the bones in their head? That moment of
freeway inspiration gave rise to the SoundBite, a device designed for
sufferers of single-sided deafness, which strikes about 50,000 people every
year in the U.S. After his friend, Michael Benninger, an otolaryngologist at
the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, told him it could really help to solve the
problem, Abolfathi set about turning his idea into reality. The biggest
challenge was miniaturization, so he opted for a piezoelectric actuator,
which needs very little power to generate the vibrations that travel through
bone. That allowed him to use a much smaller battery, making the entire
insert compact enough to fit comfortably in the mouth.
Full Story
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September 2010
Lyric is a unique hearing device designed to
incorporate the advantages of both deep canal placement and extended wear.
Deep canal placement provides many acoustic and cosmetic advantages, widely
discussed with the advent of deep-canal CIC hearing aids in the 1990s and
in a previous article about this device. Lyric remains in the ear canal 24
hours a day for up to 4 months at a time, creating a new category of hearing
device and providing patients with a unique amplification experience. The
Lyric design and same-day sizing/fitting method are designed to allow for
comfortable, deep-canal placement without deep ear canal impressions and
without the need for the patient to fuss with the device(s) on a daily
basis. This article describes patient candidacy and fitting protocols for
the Lyric device.
Full Story
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by Tanya L. Arbogast, ScD
November 2010
Lyric is a 24/7 hearing device that is unique not
only in terms of its features and how it is fit, but also in terms of
practice economics. Technical and performance characteristics,1 as well as
candidacy and fitting protocols2 for the device, were presented in previous
editions ofHR. The present article discusses the business growth
opportunities that Lyric provides for hearing care practices.
From a
business perspective, Lyric may benefit a practice in four key ways:
* Attracting
new patients;
* Increasing
referrals from current patients;
* Producing
recurring revenue; and
* Increasing
face time with patients leading to a stronger connection between clinician
and patient.
Full Story
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December 2010
The holiday season is a great time for heartwarming
stories, the kind that spotlight positive and meaningful impact caring
people make on the lives of others. One such story is the one about Solar
Ear, a project that brings hope to hundreds of thousands of hearing impaired
people in the developing world.
Simply put, Solar Ear is a low-cost hearing aid that
gets a charge from solar-powered batteries. Not only are these hearing
devices much more affordable to people in developing nations than
traditional hearing aids, but they are also eco-friendly since they decrease
our reliance on fossil fuel-based power and reduce toxic battery waste - a
hazard to our health and to the environment.
Sun, on the other hand, provides us with millions of
kilowatts of clean, safe, and cheap energy. We can't go wrong with that, can
we?
Full Story
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February 2011
The deep-canal, extended-wear hearing device, Lyric,
is designed to be worn continuously for as long as 4 months for consistent
deep-canal placement and to make wearing amplification easier (no
maintenance, repair, insertion/removal, or battery changes). It is placed
within 4 mm of the tympanic membrane, well within the sensitive bony portion
of the ear canal. As such, the effect of the device on the health of the ear
is a natural question. What happens when air circulation is decreased to the
medial portion of the ear canal, and is there any impact on the tissue that
is in continuous contact with the device for up to 4 months? This article
will review the aspects of Lyric designed to promote safe wear and healthy
ears. Ear health outcomes at device removal, collected at a private practice
ENT office that has fit Lyric since 2006, will be reviewed.
Full Story
