audiogram – Open Ears Archive

How mindfulness can help enhance your hearing experience

How we talk about things influences how we perceive them, such as talking about hearing “loss.” In the same way, how we think about hearing loss can influence how it affects us. Being mindful about my hearing and how I talk about it has taught me many good things.

The focus on hearing loss has always been on the impairment, the “dis”-ability. Certainly from one perspective that’s exactly what we have. A loss. But you could read your audiogram another way and see the amount of hearing “ability” you may still have even after a loss.

With so many advances in the past several years, 2016 may be a good time to start focusing on our actual experience of “hearing” – what I will call our “ability” to hear – and not just on our loss as measured by an audiogram.

This thought hit home for me very recently when I started to perform music again after 34 years. I was encouraged by a musician colleague to read new research about the brain’s “neuro-plasticity” and what it might mean for me and my musical aspirations. I also started aural rehabilitation and I resumed vocal training that I had discontinued three decades before.

During the past two years, through much repetition and practice, I felt that I was experiencing changes in my hearing that were definitely improvements and enhancements – even though my audiogram didn’t budge.

So what was going on? Continue reading “How mindfulness can help enhance your hearing experience”

Hear Armenia: Gifting the sound of music

After a successful trip to Haiti to provide support to children who have hearing loss, Hear The World Foundation has head to Armenia. Open Ears is following the group of Sonova team members on their journey. As Head of the Hear the World initiative, Elena Torresani leads the department of the Hear the World Foundation. She is passionate about her job and is creative and enthusiastic. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, travelling, yoga and spending time with her loved ones.

We’ve spent most of the time here in Armenia fitting children with new hearing aids, adjusting their hearing aids, preforming Visual Reinforcement Audiometry tests and doing newborn hearing screenings. It has been amazing watching the children react to new sounds and see how well they’ve adjusted to their hearing aids since the last time we were here.

One boy, named Daniel, was first fit for hearing aids when he was just eight months old. It took him one month until he reacted to his name, and now he is alert, attentive, clever and asking a lot of questions!

Another little girl Ruzana, was first had an Auditory Brainstem Response test, which was donated by Hear the World for use by the Arabkir Hospital, when she was a baby. Since her diagnosis of severe to profound hearing loss, she has received hearing aids, and now at four-and-a-half years old, she speaks well, and is doing great at school, with help from her FM system.

Aside from helping these children hear the world, we’ve also been able to provide them with a special gift, thanks to the support of Phonak team members back in Switzerland and Germany!

Continue reading “Hear Armenia: Gifting the sound of music”

Hear Haiti: Similarities hundreds of miles from home

Open Ears is following a group of Sonova team members as they head to Haiti with the Hear The World Foundation. Laurie Daley is the territory manager for northern New England for Phonak US. She is recently married, loves to travel and is a huge Patriots fan.

Day 5:

I came on this trip fully expecting a life changing experience. What I didn’t expect was that the similarities between our worlds would affect me as much as the differences.

Earlier this week, the team agreed that we were here to work (and we have!). In addition to testing for hearing loss, fitting, and follow-up of the children at the Haiti Deaf Academy, we were compelled to do more than that, and we provided other services for other at-risk groups for hearing loss, as time permitted. One of these extra projects came when we were invited to do hearing screenings for students of The Respire Haiti Christian School.

Continue reading “Hear Haiti: Similarities hundreds of miles from home”

Cheating the Test

It has been said that cheating is wrong, dishonorable, and hurtful towards others as well as yourself. The measurements for final scores become skewed, making the results incorrect for everyone, including you. I learned not to cheat on 99.9% of tests when I was fourteen, after I was nearly expelled from middle school for cheating on a science exam. Since that grievous mistake, I have taken honor codes very seriously and resolved to never cheat on an academic exam, even when I feared being kicked out of my major or not making graduation.

There is one test, however, which I always cheat.

Continue reading “Cheating the Test”

Trying Something Different

It’s no secret that I’m not a Phonak customer, despite being the editor-in-chief of this blog. It could be argued that this is a good or a bad thing, but right now I’m actually not convinced that it’s all that important.

Fitting some Phonak hearing aids

Anyway, since I started working with Phonak, it’s been (kindly) joked about that something needed to be done about my hearing aids. To tell the truth, I’m very happy about my current hearing aids, and not just because of their colour. I like the sound quality, I like the way my voice sounds (important! I speak a lot!), I even find their operating noise soothing. They allow me to understand people so much better and have really changed my life.

Continue reading “Trying Something Different”

Test Your Own or Family Members’ Hearing Yourself: Why Not?!

If a child has a hearing problem, it’s usually the case that a parent or teacher will notice it, and the kid gets a first visit with an audiologist for testing.

With adults who experience hearing loss over a long, slow period of time, it’s too common for a trip to the audiologist to get delayed, often on the order of several years. (The average procrastination period from first noticing a possible hearing issue to getting hearing aids is seven years, as I’ve noted in previous posts here. An estimated 50% of people who could benefit from hearing amplification do nothing about it, ever.)

All involved parties — the hearing-impaired person, that person’s family and friends, audiologists, and hearing-aid manufacturers — benefit from reducing that seven-year wait to get the technology in the ear in such cases. Fortunately, new technology for personal computers, smartphones, and digital tablets appear poised to address this problem.

One of my fellow bloggers here on Open Ears recently pointed me to Mimi, a nice app for Apple iPhones and iPads. (Sorry, it’s only for the Apple crowd for now; but, there are alternative self-hearing-test solutions for everyone else. More on that later.) It’s a brilliant free app, developed by audiology entrepreneurs Philipp Skribanowitz and Pascal Werner, which allows you to quickly test your hearing and get results that aren’t much different than if you got tested by an audiologist. It can then simulate what your corrected hearing would be like, which can be an eye-opener, or perhaps “ear-opener” is the better term. To do a Mimi test, you can use either a good-quality pair of over-the-ear headphones or the earbuds that came with your iPhone or iPad, and find as quiet a place as possible to run the test.

(This TechCrunch article gives a good overview of the app and Mimi’s founders’ hopes for their technology.)

OK, let’s get this out of the way first: you wouldn’t want to depend on the results of an at-home hearing test on your phone to order hearing aids using your do-it-yourself audiogram. One big reason: you won’t be testing in a soundproof room. But, a quick self-test might just make some people realize that they have some hearing loss, and motivate them to get a professional hearing test sooner.

After testing myself, sans hearing aids, using Mimi and a pair of over-the-ear headphones and confirming the obvious — that I have hearing loss bad enough to require a solution — I convinced my wife to test her ears using the Mimi app. Her self-perception is that she does not have hearing loss yet, at age 54. In recent months, I’ve wondered if she’s got a bit of hearing impairment going on, since it’s happened more often that she can’t understand something I’ve said. (It’s also possible that I sometimes speak a bit quieter in private conversations since getting my hearing aids one year ago, the result of perceiving my own voice as being louder when I speak than pre-hearing aids.)

She agreed to let me post the results of her Mimi test here:

sjn-mimi-results

So, not great, but not terrible. Her Mimi-calculated “hearing age” is three years older than her physical age. And as the chart on the left shows, she has a bit of trouble hearing at higher frequencies; and her left ear appears to be functioning not quite as well as her right.

What really raised my wife’s eyebrows in amazement was when she had Mimi simulate hearing as if it was corrected based on the profile above. She noticed a significant difference, and told me that she was quite surprised by that.

While she still doesn’t think she’s ready to get hearing aids, this little experiment did make her aware of the typical hearing loss of an adult in her mid 50s compared to when she was younger. Her plan is to get an appointment at our audiologist’s office for earwax removal, which she suspects will improve her hearing.

Sure, this test with my spouse was anecdotal, but I believe that if more people who suspect that their hearing isn’t what it used to be — or who hear from family and friends that they should consider getting their hearing checked — could be exposed to the existence of the Mimi app and other alternatives, many more people would check their own hearing at home. It’s less threatening or scary than visiting an audiologist, who “might find something seriously wrong with my ears” or be an “unnecessary expense.” Such self-tests most likely will result in more people with age-related hearing loss making that appointment with an audiologist sooner, since the app’s data will show what their minds have been denying.

As mentioned above, Mimi is not the only self-test application out there. Here are a few other options:

Self-Test for Hearing Loss Checklist: this is simply a list of symptoms that may indicate hearing impairment. It’s a good place to start prior to taking a self-serve online or mobile-device hearing test.
Online Hearing Test at OnlineAudioClinic.com.au: use your computer and headphones for this; it tests ability to decipher spoken words over varying background-noise levels.
Online Audiogram Hearing Test: another computer-and-headphones test; this one uses tones to determine your personal audiogram.
Test Your Hearing (Android app): less sophisticated than Mimi, but works on smartphones running the Android operating system.
Hearing Test (Android app): another smartphone app for Android that creates a self-test audiogram.
Hearing Test (iPhone/iPad app): here’s one more for Apple users; this one costs US 99 cents.
Search Google for more. There are lots of online hearing tests, and a lesser number of mobile apps. Fortunately, most of them are free.