Founded in 1998, The Tech Museum of Innovation (“The Tech” for short) in downtown San Jose, CA is an impressive facility, located in the heart of Silicon Valley.Ironically, the acoustics are far from state-of-the-art. We attended the Music for Minors gala on April 7, 2019, sitting at a table whose other guests (who included The Tech’s board chairman) agreed with us. This is a high-profile example, but we believe that most facilities lack thoughtful design (drapes, acoustical tile on the ceiling, etc.) to dampen challenging sounds or noises. We can only guess that acoustics get short shrift when buildings or rooms are designed and constructed. Restaurants, including upscale ones, are usually lacking in sound-dampening.

Many months ago while searching for innovative hearing aids we came across a couple of new ventures whose products intended to include a capability of recognizing words and displaying them on a smartphone, but those ventures apparently have not succeed as of yet. In mid-July 2018, however, we discovered a fascinating app for the iPhone that displays text on its screen corresponding to the spoken words of the person we are speaking with. It is one of a number of products called Voice over IP.

The French founder (Olivier Jeannel) was born deaf, so was very motivated to use modern technology to compensate for his disability. His and his two-cofounders’ (CTO Sidney Burks and CMO Pablo Seuc-Rocher) efforts started in 2013, and the venture had raised 660,000 Euros as of March 2018.

Thus far anyone can apparently use the app for free. We tried it, and it worked fine. (You need a high-bandwidth Internet connection: cable, 3G, or WiFi.) We spoke only in English (except for the word Guillermo, which is Spanish for William, that was recognized).The company says that it can handle English, French, Italian, Japanese (we wonder how that looks on the screen), Polish (an interesting alternative), and Spanish. One thing that it didn’t do was to handle words that we spelled out (in English), so there may be some challenges to clarifying misunderstood words.

It will be interesting to see how the company monetizes its technology. The average price of iPhone apps is only US$4.37, which is tiny compared with the price of conventional hearing aids (which rarely work as well as RogerVoice).

If so many people with hearing loss don’t wear their hearing aids (in some cases because hearing aids don’t work very well), they can’t get any benefits from their preventing dementia, falls, depression, and other maladies. But there are a lot of reasons why many hearing aids don’t work well, and why people are uncomfortable even with “working” hearing aids.

One of the most frequent reasons that people put their hearing aids in a drawer and don’t wear them is that the hearing aid they purchased actually doesn’t work well FOR THEM. The process of having one’s hearing tested and a hearing aid purchased appears to suffer from a “one size fits all” syndrome. There seems to be such a a long and steep “learning curve” to the process of diagnosis, prescription, and training that many people run out of patience and simply give up. Apparently the high cost of hearing aids is not a sufficient motivation for buyers to “soldier on” to the point of discovering the benefits of the devices.

However, it is important to remember that the brain plays an important role in hearing. It is not the ear itself that needs to learn, but the brain has to learn to deal with a different set of inputs. And this cannot be done full-time, as we all have to continue all of the rest of our thinking and acting too.

The non-use of hearing aids has strongly piqued the curiosity of scientists, who have conducted numerous studies. Unfortunately these studies seem to have focused more on their methodology than on discovering the principal reasons for non-use of the hearing aids themselves.

Hearing loss is associated with an increased risk of dementia, falls and depression. As people age, more and more of them suffer from hearing loss. According to the AARP 29% of people in their 50’s, 45% of people in their 60’s, and 68% of people in the 70’s have significant hearing loss. Its impact on quality of life is greater that obesity, diabetes, strokes, or cancer.

Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA) is essentially a group of individuals who are hard of hearing, a sort of bottoms-up non-profit organization compared with many tops-down profit-oriented organizations. Because one-fifth of Americans are estimated to have some degree of hearing loss, its activities have a potential of improving the lives of nearly 50 million people. It does this via local chapters, state organizations, and a national office near Washington, DC. Local chapters are like support groups, valuable because all attendees have similar problems and can benefit considerably from the experiences and advice of other attendees.

It is not surprising that a hearing aid company like Beltone would praise the value of improved hearing to reduce the likelihood of a person’s contracting Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.Beltone referred to a number of studies, which may have included the one by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the National Institute on Aging.

We can’t claim that our post a week ago, concerning iPhone earbuds and hearing aids, triggered The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article urging Trump to appoint a savvy FDA (Food and Drug Administration) head who could pressure the hearing aid industry to offer substantially lower-priced solutions. Actually, the FDA had already in early December 2016 announced that it would (a) stop enforcing the requirement that patients get a prescription from a highly-trained and degreed specialist (audiologist) before thay can purchase hearing aids, and (b) consider creating a new category of over-the-counter products.

THE FACT THAT THERE ARE NO PRODUCT-BY-PRODUCT REPORTS (ONLY A BASIC GUIDE TO THE CATEGORY AS A WHOLE) ABOUT HEARING ASSISTANCE DEVICES FROM THE CONSUMER REPORTS ORGANIZATION SHOULD IMMEDIATELY TRIGGER SUSPICION ABOUT THIS CATEGORY OF PRODUCTS.

But thanks to our continual tracking of hearing issues and technology, we can correct some of the vagueness, omissions, and errors in the recent WSJ article. Two items were particularly wide of the mark. First was what they called an “over-the-counter hearing device”. There are two types of hearing devices— “true” hearing aids (medical devices that are regulated by national government authorities in most countries) and small audio amplifiers often called PSAPs (Personal Sound Amplification Products). Hearing aids are expensive (typically $1,500-6,000), may not be covered (even for military veterans) by medical insurance, and are mostly sold by small and specialized organizations who employ highly-trained audiologists. (An interesting exception is Costco, which sells units (made by Sivantos, formerly Siemens) only in the low-priced end of the range and appears to have—or is in the process of recruiting–degreed audiologists.) PSAPs cost as little as $30 and as much as about $750 (including both left and right ears). The WSJ article was vague, but apparently it was advocating that hearing aids should be sold without a prescription. However, given the difference in price ranges, they well could have been talking mainly about PSAPs. We have personally had highly mixed results with PSAPs. The $30 models were, unsurprisingly, junk. The highly-publicized (because of its design based on the R&D conducted by the noted Dr. Rodney Perkins) Soundhawk brand quickly went bankrupt (pretty-but-operationally-challenged design and poor customer service due to its low-budget phone-and-web nature). The clunky-looking models from PerfectChoiceHD and SoundWorld Solutions sell in the $350-750 range and MAY be adequate for many people with only modest hearing problems. We tested the SoundWorld Solutions model but could not find much or any hearing improvement.

Second was the article’s advice to take a free online hearing test. We reviewed 15 different ones. With one exception, they were useless or even worse. Some of them were disguised self-serving means of prospecting for potential customers because they required you to register. We realize that it is good business not to give away what you sell, but the tests weren’t very good anyway (some were just a few multiple-test questions). Others required you to wear headphones or use a telephone, which would potentially add a lot of noise that compromised the test (and likely preclude your wearing any PSAPs for comparison purposes). The exception was the innovative innovative Online Hearing Test and Audiogram Printout, which enabled us to create a crude hearing loss vs. frequency curve like the one that illustrates this post. But this curve, or the better ones prepared by trained audiologists using professional equipment, appears to be essentially useless, and mainly a selling tool of audiologists. It is unlikely to help anyone purchase a PSAP. It MIGHT give SOME guidance in selecting a hearing aid, but the features, appearance, and—most importantly—actual experience during the warranty period are likely far more important.

You can lose a little or a lot of your hearing by listening too much with the volume turned up on your iPod or iPhone, or other device, because many of the earbuds in use aren’t very effective so people turn up the volume. Studies have found that users of these Apple devices can be listening at 100-105 decibels. This is well above the OSHA-recommended 85 decibels.

Remember, ears that get damaged stay damaged. They can’t be repaired. And when people talk about decibels (dBA), which is how loudness is measured, we need to remember that they are logarithmic, so that a small increase in the number means a big increase in the noise level (adding 10 dBA DOUBLES the noise level).

If you are socially-inclined and attend galas, they nearly always have dancing, to either a band or a DJ (sometimes a worse bet volume-wise because he has lots of watts at his command). Unfortunately, they almost always have live auctions too, and often when the auctioneer comes on the sound gets louder. (A similar boost happens sometimes when the ads play on radio or TV.) We recommend that you always carry earplugs, and use them when things get too loud. It’s a lot better than suffering hearing loss for the rest of your life.

Those men (and women) who have decided to do something about their hearing loss can find it challenging to get accurate and objective information about assisted-hearing devices. The result for many of them is spending a lot of time with trial-and-error to find a usable solution, and that they end up with no usable device. The culprit may well be that the great multitide of different manufacturers and models of hearing aids and personal sound amplification products (PSAPs) is not matched by reliable comparisons of specifications and analysis of plusses and minuses. One would expect that Consumer Reports would be a good source, but although they offer a good general overview,it is difficult/impossible to find how one can actually BUY their reviews. Fortunately there is an authoritative and objective free website that contains a wealth of information that can be helpful before and during their journey. Three of the most helpful “Sections” are Better Hearing Consumer featuring Gael Hannan, Hearing Economics featuring Holly Hosford-Dunn, and Wayne’s World featuring Dr. Wayne Staab.