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2 min reading time
Hi Medical Devices Group, I would like to request a bit of advice. My Dad is 87 years old and he is pretty hard of hearing. His left ear is a lot worse than his right. We have a very expensive pair of in-ear hearing aids for him but he hates them and refuses to use them. My Dad uses a very basic sound amplifier device that he wears around his neck with ear-buds now but he mainly only uses it in his good ear. I’m looking for a relatively inexpensive sound amplifier device that would work with any pair of headphones but at least be tunable to make the sound going to the bad ear louder than the sound going to the good ear. If the device can suppress the sound of his own voice when he is speaking, that’s a plus. If it can be tuned to the ranges of sounds he can hear in each ear, even better. We tried using an Android app (Petralex) which is tunable and works with wired or Bluetooth headphones. The app gave my Dad a hearing test and then tuned the audio to what he can hear in each ear. The audio quality was quite good and he could hear and respond to us much better than normal. There were still 2 problems: Delay and Echo. Delay – It seems that any smartphone based app takes time to process the incoming audio into outgoing audio through the headphones. This leads to about a quarter of a second delay. This delay can be very disconcerting for the person listening as the speaker’s lips don’t match the incoming sound. Echo – The second issue is hearing your own voice echoing back into your headphones when you speak. This echo combined with the quarter second delay is highly distracting. So the bottom line is that hard of hearing folks like my Dad with one ear worse than the other need a real time audio amplification system with no echo, suppression of the sound of their own voice, and tunable so that each ear is managed separately. Thank you very much for any advice you can provide. With the combined knowledge and experience of all the great folks in this group, I know we can come up with a solution for my Dad. Best regards, source: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/78665/78665-6069889000007614465 Marked as spam
 Posted by Asked on November 10, 2015 12:00 am
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Private answer
Ee Bin Liew
both my late parents had similar hearing issues. since it is not balanced and it seems that it is just straightforward hard of hearing..perhaps one way is to find a small ear/headphone preamp that has balance controls, and perhaps hook that up with a very small but decent quality microphone? I saw something of that sort in the hospital that my mum was on and was used to great effect
that said, could your Dad be having issues with not being able to process and filter noise from the desired source? My late dad was a bit like that, and for watching TV, what I got him was wireless headphones and told him to limit the volume.. the noise isolation worked wonders because he could listen to the TV audio at low levels when the noise was blocked out. hope it helps Cheers, Ee Bin Marked as spam
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