Imagine yourself as a person with significant hearing loss. While seated to watch a movie or wherever there is a public addressing system conveying an important issue, you find yourself struggling to hear and eventually feel the pain for lacking the sense. Which of the following hearing solutions would you prefer? Would you want to take the initiative to locate, check out, wear, and later return special equipment, often a receiver with a headset or earphones that are probably incompatible with your hearing aids or to push a hearing aid or cochlear implant button, turning your own hearing instrument into a wireless loudspeaker that broadcasts sound customized for your own ears? This is what David Myers - a psychology professor at Hope College in the US ask. He has become a strong advocate in US of the hearing technology called induction-loop system, also known as a hearing loop. Professor Myers, who himself has impaired hearing, first became aware of the technology more than a decade ago during worship somewhere in Scotland, where the building's poor acoustics prevented him from clearly hearing the service. At his wife's request, Myers switched on his hearing aids “T” (for telecoil) setting to see what would happen. The sudden clarity was overwhelming, to his delight. Since then Myers and other have worked to introduce the technology to the US, and today, several pilot project have been launched including hearing loops in taxis and set up information booths in New York subway system. In recent years, modern versions of this classic technology have also spread to smaller British venues – including Post office branches and thousands of ticket windows, bank teller stations, and tourist information counters. In London taxis, a dashboard microphone picks up the driver's voice and transmits it to a back seat hearing loop. Thanks to the recent initiative, hundreds of West Michigan venues, - including most places of worship and Grand Rapids' convention center and airport - now broadcast wireless sound to hearing aids. Standard hearing aids capture sound via a microphone and then send an amplified version to an earpiece. They work well in a relatively calm atmosphere, but in noisy places, sounds are not very clear, and the user will have difficulty in understanding anything. A simple technology that sidesteps the problem, which is long available in Europe, would immensely help the hearing-impaired person to listen to public addressing systems and other kinds of speeches more intelligibly. Professor Myers told Saudi Gazette in an email interview that “My hearing aids now serve me as customized wireless loudspeakers whether I'm watching the evening news in my looped TV room at home.. or awaiting an airline boarding announcement at my home airport in the Grand Rapids. Thanks to their doubled functionality, I now love the hearing aids I once barely tolerated. I am comfortable with technology and could afford any of today's high-end wireless hearing technologies. I welcome field induction devices that directly connect hearing aids to phones and music players. Often in conjunction with telecoils, these devices offer another layer of higher assistive technology.” Although the technology is not yet available in the Kingdom, this would be welcome news for many who have impaired hearing here and indeed, all over the world. The time may be near for a hearing-impaired person to listen to music or the news again with a low cost, low-tech solution: the simple T-coil. - SG What exactly is the T-Coil? Telecoils (T-coils), sometimes referred to as “Telephone Coils”, allow audio sources to be directly connected to a hearing aid, which is intended to help the wearer filter out background noise. They can be used with telephones, FM systems (with neck loops), and induction loop systems (also called “hearing loops”) that transmit sound to hearing aids from public address systems and TVs. In the UK and the Nordic countries, hearing loops are widely used in shops, railway stations, and other public places. In the US, telecoils and hearing loops are gradually becoming more common. A T-coil consists of a metal core (or rod) around which ultra-fine wire is coiled. T-coils are also called induction coils because when the coil is placed in a magnetic field, an alternating electrical current is induced in the wire. The T-coil detects magnetic energy and tranduces(or converts) it to electrical energy. Although T-coils are effectively a wide-band receiver, interference is unusual in most hearing loop situations. Interference can manifest as a buzzing sound, which varies in volume depending on the distance the wearer is from the source. Sources are electromagnetic fields, such as old (not flat) computer monitors, older flourescent lighting, some dimmer switchers, and airplanes.
