Healing the hearing world

From: Portsmouth Herald News, NH - Nov 11, 2004

By Michael McCord
mmccord@seacoastonline.com

PORTSMOUTH - Since Carol Richards suffered hearing loss damage almost 17 years ago following a skiing accident, her ability to communicate was, at best, complicated.

Despite wearing two hearing aids, there were many social situations that made her uncomfortable, said Richards, a 46-year-old who lives in Deerfield.

"I could hear, but not well," she said. Richards had difficulty sorting out background noise and speech despite the ability to make manual adjustments to her hearing aids. What many people would consider normal activities - talking on the phone, listening to a church sermon or going out to a restaurant - were all too often "high-stress" situations for Richards.

Richards hearing capabilities and, she emphasizes, her life changed a few months ago when she ran into her audiologist at Rye Beach.

Stephen Little, the co-owner of Seacoast Hearing Center in Portsmouth, suggested that Richards consider a new and highly promising hearing aid called the Oticon Syncro. Richards made the switch, and she says the transformation has been dramatic.

"My hearing is astoundingly better," Richards said during a phone interview, an activity she said would have been much more challenging just a few months earlier. "Im more fun to be around. If you cant hear well, its a tremendous emotional strain, but now my friends tell me I seem less stressful."

Richards said shes gained enough confidence to take a job she considered unthinkable a short time ago: She became an aide for an elementary school teacher.

"With all the potential noise difficulties and stress, I couldnt have done this," she said. Richards can now hear the softer sounds of speech in the high frequency range that were difficult to decipher except in the most benign of noise environments.

According to government estimates, Richards is one of 28 million Americans of all ages who suffer from varying degrees of hearing loss.

Only about 25 percent of those who need them use hearing aids. Little said the numbers tell only a small part of the story.

"One of the misconceptions about hearing loss is that it only impacts the person who needs help," Little said. "But when your ability to communicate is impaired and distorted, it affects all those around you."

Little says the emergence of competitive products such as the Oticon Syncro and ReSoundAIR are the "most remarkable breakthroughs ... and most intelligent hearing aids Ive seen" since founding Seacoast Hearing Center eight years ago.

"Weve had a lot of patients who have been fit with hearing aids and done marginally well, but this is a fantastic step into a new world of hearing for many of them," Little said.

According to Little, he and Seacoast Hearing Center co-owner Lisa Tessier have fitted about 50 patients with the new hearing aids in the past few months, and not one has been returned.

"We usually get around 20 percent returned and for a number of reasons, like they didnt feel right or didnt sound right or they didnt like the way their voice sounded," Little explained as he gave a demonstration of the new devices in his Islington Avenue office.

The new hearing aids are sleeker, smaller and lighter than other hearing aids, and they no longer block the ear canal. The main advancement, Little said, is the sophistication of the computer processing chip and the digital sound capability.

"Traditional hearing aids had a microphone, but they pick up all the noise and you can hear everything. (The new hearing aids) are doing it much better by sorting out noise and speech," Little said. "They also do much more to restore high-frequency capabilities than anything Ive experienced as an audiologist."

In the case of the Oticon Syncro, said an Oticon Inc. product manager, there has been a quantum leap of the technology into the realm of artificial intelligence.

"Weve had digital hearing aids for about eight years, but what they often did was make predictions on what you should hear," said Tami Gaeu from Oticon headquarters in New Jersey.

But "the Syncro has a three-tier parallel processing chip that allows the hearing aid to anticipate and make decisions for you," Gaeu said. "It interacts with the environment and offers solutions for unpredictable noise settings."

In essence, imagine the new hearing aids as a recording studio with chips acting as recording engineers sorting out sounds with a 16-track system.

According to Gaeu, reports from the field reveal that patients have said time and again that "its as close to normal hearing as possible."

Thats the sentiment of John Warren, a 79-year-old retired teacher who lives in Exeter.

Warren has dealt with hearing loss for five years and spent thousands of dollars on hearing aids. And none of them ever worked well enough, said Warren, a naval aviator during World War II and a scholar of the poet Robert Frost.

"I was totally dependent on my hearing aid and still had problems hearing my wife and a lot of other things," Warren said.

Though he had spent around $6,500 in the past couple of years for the best of an older generation of hearing aids, he said he didnt think twice about spending thousands more when Little fitted him with the ReSoundAIR a few weeks ago.

"I do not have a hearing problem any more," Warren said. "I feel like my hearing is where it was when I was 20." His old hearing aids, he said, are "now ready for the junk heap."

Little is concerned about a digital divide due to the cost of new hearing aids, which can range in price from $2,500 to $5,000 and are not covered in most health insurance plans. But he believes, as with most new technologies, the price will go down and become more affordable to many more in need.

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