Assistive Listening Devices (ALDs)

Hearing aids alone may not provide adequate assistance in all situations. As a supplement to hearing aids, a selection of assistive listening devices are available such as

• Amplified telephones
• TV Ears
• Alarm clocks with shakers
• Pocket talkers
• Doorbell signalers
• Smoke detectors

In addition, wireless FM and Bluetooth connectivity is also available for some televisions, telephones, cell phones, MP3 Players and computers. For more information on connectivity for your Bluetooth compatible hearing aids please visit the Oticon website.

Hearing professionals carries a wide variety of assistive listening devices (ALD’s) from several manufacturers in order to meet the individual needs of each patient. Please call with any questions you may have on ALD’s.

How Assistive Technology Can Help
Many auditory and non-auditory devices - collectively known as Assistive Technology, Assistive Listening Devices (ALDs), or Hearing Assistance Technology (HAT) - are available to help people with all degrees of hearing loss to meet these important communication needs. These devices can be classified according to the need they address. ALD devices are available to facilitate:

• Face-to-face communication
• Reception of electronic media
• Telephone reception
• Reception of important warning sounds and situations

Auditory Technology
Speech is a complex, fast-moving target. It changes in level, depending on vocal effort and distance. It also changes in pitch depending upon gender and the various sounds uttered. It can be spoken in quiet as well as in noise and in reverberation (room echo). How well you hear and understand speech depends on all of these factors, as well as the exact nature of your own hearing difficulty. Today's hearing aids are designed and fitted to provide sufficient audibility so that speech can be heard and understood as clearly as possible, both in quiet and amidst a noisy background. However, they are designed to do this for sounds within a relatively close distance. Beyond this distance, room reverberation makes listening very difficult, even with the best hearing aids. Thus, while hearing aids may form the "heart" of a person's listening system, there are times when additional auditory technology may be needed for effective communication.

Auditory devices can be thought of (roughly) as "binoculars for the ears". By placing a remote microphone next to the talker (or loudspeaker) or by connecting directly into the sound source (TV, VCR, MP3 player, etc.), these devices bring the desired sound closer to one's ear(s) before it has a chance of being mixed with noise and reverberation. The "captured" sound is then sent to the listener via a "hardwired" or "wireless" link.

Hearing Professionals carries a wide variety of products such as Amplified Telephones, Pocket Talkers, TV Ears, Alarm Clocks, and more. Please call or email us for more information.

Visual Technology
For those who cannot understand over the voice telephone, even with amplification, there are other options such as the Voice Carry Over (VCO) or "read and talk" Telephone. Used with the telephone relay service, VCO allows you to talk directly to the other party while an operator translates what the other party says to you into print that is displayed on a small LCD screen. Other telecommunications options for people who experience difficulty understanding speech over the telephone include email, instant messaging, TTYs, and two-way pagers. Pagers by Wyndtel, T-Mobile, and Blackberry can be used not only to house your daily schedule and address book, but also to surf the web as well as to chat back and forth, in real time, with friends, family, and colleagues. Some models also provide two-way paging with voice telephone communication.

Alerting Devices
Alerting devices allow hard of hearing and deaf people to be aware of many environmental sounds and situations in the home, in school or in the workplace, as well as for travel and recreation. Such systems use either microphones or electrical connections to pick up the desired signal and hardwired or wireless transmission to send the signal to you in a form to which you can respond. For example, when someone presses the doorbell button, when the phone rings or the fire alarm is activated, these events can trigger a flashing incandescent or fluorescent light, a loud horn, a vibrational device (pager, bed shaker), or a fan. Some systems use a combination of signals. For example, there are alarm clocks that will beep, flash a lamp, and shake the bed - simultaneously (a nifty idea for heavy sleepers).

Alerting devices can be purchased individually to warn a person of a specific event or as complete systems that warn a person of a variety of events. For example, someone living in a one-room studio apartment might need just a simple device that flashes a single light when someone presses the doorbell, whereas another individual living in a large house with many rooms may need a system that triggers flashing lamps in every room of the house when the doorbell is pressed, the telephone rings, or the fire alarm is activated. Some systems use coded flashing lights (e.g. 5 flashes for the doorbell vs. one flash for every time the phone rings) whereas others use a vibrating body-worn pager that vibrates and displays a number corresponding to the event (e.g. number 1 = fire; number 2 = doorbell).

See an example of how alerting devices can be installed within your home.