When you’re hard of hearing, day-to-day communication can be difficult, and group activities can be downright exhausting. Here are some tips from the audiology specialists at LACE on making conversation easier.

 

1. Position yourself about 3 to 5 feet from the person you are talking with. The loudness of sound fades rapidly as it travels, so the farther away you are from a speaker, the harder it is to hear what is said.

 

2. Avoid carrying on conversations from another room. It is tempting, but unproductive!

 

3. Look at the person who is speaking. Position yourself to get a full view of the face, not just the profile.

 

4. Concentrate on the main idea the speaker is expressing rather than straining to understand every word that is said. Oftentimes speech is redundant and predictable.

 

5. Don’t bluff and nod as if you understand when you don’t. It is better to ask questions than to continue down the wrong path.

 

6. Maximize the use of lighting. Have the light behind you so the speaker’s face is well illuminated.

 

7. Minimize interfering background noise by turning off the television, radio, running water or fan when conversing, or find a quiet corner for your conversation.

 

8. Have someone take notes for you in meetings so you can concentrate on the speaker and be certain that you aren’t missing anything.

 

9. At social gatherings, arrive early before the party becomes too large and noisy. Find the quieter places to converse.

 

10. When going to a movie or play, read reviews in advance to learn about the plot.

 

These tips and others are offered throughout LACE Auditory Training, which you can do online in the privacy of your own home in 11 sessions. Sign up for LACE and begin retraining your brain to make the most of the sounds you do hear!

Hearing loss among military vets doesn’t get much respect, as injuries go. No one hugs overseas-bound soldiers at the airport saying, “Just make it back home with all your hearing, you understand?”

Maybe they should. According to the Hearing Loss Association of America, hearing loss and tinnitus are the two most common service-related disabilities among American veterans, outstripping post-traumatic stress disorder, back problems, lost limbs and a host of other war-related horrors—and costing individuals an average of $12,000 a year in lost income, not to mention frustration, isolation and, if left untreated, cognitive decline.

When you narrow the field to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s unclear how prevalent hearing loss and tinnitus are, but indications are troubling. The Defense Department notes that in the current wars, 75% of injuries are from blasts—and 50% of those blasts cause permanent hearing loss (not to be confused with total hearing loss). According to the L.A. Times, 43% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans on disability have tinnitus.

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by Traci Hukill

I took the LACE training course in December. What that means is that for 30 minutes a day for three weeks, I sat down in front of my computer in a quiet room and did listening comprehension exercises designed to improve my listening skills, complete with regular testing to monitor my progress.

Besides helping me hone my ability to focus on speech even in tough circumstances, the LACE training was fun—a bonus I hadn’t counted on. Here are the things I liked best about it:

‘Competing Voices’ Exercises   In a nutshell, LACE training consists of five types of listening exercises. Competing Voices features two speakers talking at the same time about two totally different topics. The trick is to follow one of the voices (which means blocking out the other voice) and be able to repeat the sentence. The program makes it more difficult by increasing the volume of the voice you don’t want to hear. Just like life!

Testimonial Videos   The first few LACE training sessions include short testimonial videos from people who’ve completed the training. One of these is San Francisco Chronicle senior pop music critic Joel Selvin, who says he took LACE training as part of his research for an article but discovered unexpected benefits shortly afterward when he found himself seated at a large round table in a, yes,  noisy restaurant.

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A look back at some of the hearing devices of the past and their modern-day counterparts. 

BLARIN’ WITH FLAIR

Old-timey Hearing Aid: The Ear Trumpet  The first widely manufactured hearing aids were ear trumpets—those instruments of aural assistance that were about as discreet as a giraffe at your dinner table. They ranged from about 6 inches to 12 inches long and came in a variety of materials: silver, brass, wood, ivory, tortoiseshell, faux tortoiseshell. They came camouflaged in fans, curved like pipes and straight like soprano saxophones, but the basic principle remained the same: collect sound via a large opening and funnel it into the ear via a small opening.

Some people managed to make their ear trumpets fashionable, like the eccentric Swiss aristocrat Madame de Meuron, pictured above. She reportedly once answered the question of why she carried an ear trumpet by saying, “So I can hear only what I want to hear.” Hmph!

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