Tag: sign language

What Is Waiting For Us Around The Corner [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

A few days ago I stumbled upon a Forbes article about 4 game-changing technologies for the deaf and hard of hearing. I read it with interest, as I keep rubbing shoulders with the tech/startup world, and the moment it intersects with hearing technology, I immediately wonder what the technological future for hearing-impaired people like me might look like (remember my excitement about mimi?)

Without being an expert on either innovation or the hearing aid industry, here’s what I see when I look around. There are startups, like mimi, who approach issues from original angles, and clearly try to disrupt the market. But big companies innovate too.

future-of-hearing-technology

Over the last year or two, for example, we’ve heard a lot about Made for iPhone hearing aids, that will connect directly to your iPhone without a streamer (there’s a price though, not least a battery life of 2-3 days).

Also featured in Yahoo News’s game-changing wearable devices, Phonak’s Roger Pen, a versatile device that makes hearing in difficult situations much easier. I have yet to test it (soon, hopefully!) but I know a bunch of deaf students who swear by it. Less conducive to attention-grabbing headlines than “bluetooth hearing aids”, but maybe more important, there is also Venture, the new platform for Phonak aids. This can seem “softer” innovation, as it is “the next version” (after Quest, which I also tried), but if it is so good you fall asleep with your hearing aids on and forget to use your programmes, isn’t that quite incredible? Not to forget Lyric, a truly invisible hearing aid that you wear 24/7 and change every few months.

Anyway. Back to the article that got me writing today, and the players it showcases, along with my somewhat skeptical comments.

We have MotionSavvy, a tablet and software that translate sign language into spoken language in real time. This sounds really exciting, but can it really bridge the deaf and hearing worlds? I don’t sign, so I’m not certain of the implications of carrying a tablet around and signing with one hand. Also, I know that facial expression is an important part of sign language — will MotionSavvy manage that? I’d be interested in feedback from people who use sign primarily to communicate on how “real-life-useful” this seems to them. From the technology point of view it’s clearly exciting, though. (Update: two MotionSavvy founders + other employees are deaf, so I’m reducing my skepticism a few notches and increasing my enthusiasm about the project — “scratch your own itch” is always a selling-point for me.)

Then there is Solar Ear, which is about getting solar-rechargeable batteries in hearing aids for developing countries. We’ve written a few posts here about the Hear Haiti Project, and I’m certain that in addition to hearing aids the volunteers with the Hear the World Foundation must be bringing many many packs of batteries with them in their luggage. So, clearly, batteries that can be recharged with solar power sound like a great advance. However, there are reasons we’re not already widely using rechargeable batteries in hearing aids. This is above my pay-grade, but I did peek at their specs for the 312 battery (those I use), and I see it’s Ni-MH, which I read in the other article suffers from issues like the memory effect and capacity fading. Have they found a way around this, or do they simply design a hearing aid that can deal with these issues?

Third, ISEEWHATYOUSAY (video). This is a speech-to-text device. You speak a message into your end, and the message appears typed on the other person’s device. This is the less convincing one for me, because I don’t see how it is very different than dictating a text message into your phone for the other person.

Last but not least, in the vein of pimping your hearing aids, Hayleigh’s Cherished Charms. Hayleigh started drawing hearing-aid jewellery when she was little to encourage her classmates to stop hiding their hearing aids behind their hair. Now 16, Heyleigh runs a proper business selling her charms, complete with Etsy store!

The Hearing Loss Spectrum, Between the Hearing World and Deaf Culture [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

Since becoming the editor of this blog, one thing I’ve struggled with is the diversity of “hearing loss” experiences we would like to reflect. This is parallel with all the questions related to the minefield of hearing-related terminology, which we’ve touched upon in a couple of past articles. I actually drafted another article on the topic after Christina wrote hers about reclaiming the term “hearing impaired” for herself. But it’s been sitting there because I didn’t feel I was managing to get it right. And because I’m very much afraid of saying the wrong thing on a loaded topic (as I am with this very post).

In what I’ll call the “hearing loss spectrum”, for lack of a better expression, there is a reasonably obvious distinction, the importance of which was recently brought to my attention on a couple of occasions. Not that I wasn’t aware of it before, but I’ve come to a deeper understanding of it — and of its relevance to the editorial line of Open Ears (part of my job here).

The distinction is the following: is your primary means of communication through vocal speech, or signed language? Of course there are people who use both, but for most or us I think, it is one or the other. Is your culture hearing culture, or Deaf culture?

About a month ago I heard that Christine Sun Kim was giving a talk at the MIT Media Lab. Christine is a sound artist — and she’s deaf. Of course this made me curious, and I thought it would be interesting to talk about her work on Open Ears (which I’m doing, actually, by writing this ;-)). Then the “rift” between parts of the “hearing loss” and “deaf” communities was pointed out to me. My initial reaction was “no big deal, Open Ears is about the whole ‘hearing loss spectrum’.”

But in the days that followed, and as I read more about Christine’s work, and watched videos, and explored more about deaf language and culture [PDF], I realised that I was missing something.

Hearing technology (hearing aids and cochlear implants, mainly) is about making it possible for those who want it to take part in hearing culture as normally as possible even though their “lesser hearing” makes this difficult, to varying degrees. In that respect, this blog is clearly about the hearing world.

A couple of weeks later, I met a woman whose son is deaf. He can hear very loud sounds (ambulances etc.) with the help of a powerful hearing aid, but that’s it. They sign, of course. She was telling me about how extremely difficult our Swiss ideal of “total integration in the classroom” was for deaf kids (like asking little hearing kids to take part in a class full of telepaths).

Her story kind of drove home for me how very different it is to be part of hearing or deaf culture — deafness here as a linguistic and culture minority: the Deaf.

And so, yes, there is a whole spectrum of hearing loss. But at some point there are two worlds that are culturally different and communicate via different mediums (oral speech or sign). To some extent, they are related to degrees of hearing loss, but not necessarily.

This is quite obvious, I’m aware. It’s not a new idea for me either. But as an editor who is forever thinking about and questioning the editorial line of this blog (do we write about this? and what about this? and this? or not?), these two encounters helped me clarify that we do not want to encroach upon the territory of all the great Deaf publications out there, and that Open Ears respectfully remains on the “hearing culture” side of hearing loss.