Should buying a hearing aid be like buying a TV or buying a pair of glasses? When you buy a new TV you can go into your local electronic store and try out a bunch of different models and pick the one you like. You get hands-on with the TV before you part with your [...]

I walked into the office yesterday morning and walked straight into a conversation between a few people. I said hello and answered a question from one of them and then walked over to my desk. I took my coat off, grabbed my cup to make a tea (I’m English, we do a lot of tea), [...]

Dehumidifier pot OK, it’s not going to be the most exciting present under the tree this year but, for the hearing aid wearer in your life, it could be one of the most useful. Dehumidifier pots remove moisture from hearing aids, this helps prolong the life of the aid and keeps it functioning properly – [...]

Hearing aids come in lots of cool colours and shapes these days but I’ve never seen a pure white one. White hearing aids would look quite a bit like iPod earphones and would maybe help to give them that cool factor? Everywhere you look these days someone has a pair of white buds in so [...]

There are some manual captioning services around, captvids.com is one, that do manual captioning of videos. That’s cool but I’m wondering if it’s possible to do automatic captioning? There’s a lot of speech recognition software around, Dragon Naturally Speaking for example, that do an amazing job. It’s probably 7 or 8 years since I’ve used [...]

Could we build a hearing aid? By we I mean me, you, the guy studying audiology at university, the hard of hearing electrical engineer and all the other people. In computer software there’s a thing called open source. What it means is that someone, or some people, build something and they don’t just release the [...]

I don’t think that UK hospitals and GP surgeries are doing enough to make themselves accessible to their deaf and hard of hearing patients. Take my local GP surgery as an example: They have a largish waiting room. They have a single speaker at one end of the room that most doctors use to call [...]

Sarah, who writes the Speak Up Librarian blog, has just launched a range of t-shirts for the hard of hearing. She says that the prints, “express our communication needs with grace, humor, and a little bit of attitude”. And they certainly do that! Here’s Sarah herself modelling one of the prints. Check out the Speak [...]

I’ve been wearing a pair of Starkey’s new S Series hearing aids for about a month now. I have the in-the-canal (ITC) model. On Starkey’s website they list the S Series’ main features. I’ve written a bit below about how each feature is working for me. PureWave Feedback Eliminator I have not had a single [...]

I see a lot of adverts in the newspapers and on the TV for glasses. Every day there are full-page adverts in the papers and prime-time adverts on the big TV channels. Everyone is doing “Buy one get one free” offers or “Designer frames for free” etc etc. Glasses are cool, the designer frames are [...]