CAN YOU STOP YOUR EARS RINGING BY CUTTING BACK ON CHOCOLATE AND COFFEE?

Or is that just another one of the myths about tinnitus? Listen to our new podcast series and find out.

Search the Internet, and you can find lots of advice and recommendations for dealing with tinnitus. The question is: which ones should you choose? And do any of them actually work?

Dr Pawel Jastreboff can understand the confusion. In his opinion, the Internet is overwhelmed with information – and misinformation. “There’s a lot of myths on the internet, and numerous people with a cure for tinnitus,” he says. So what can you do about it?

Learning to cope

There are several ways to tackle it. One approach that has achieved good results was developed by Dr Jastreboff himself. It’s called Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT) and is a process of learning to cope with your tinnitus on a conscious and subconscious level.

He likens it to the sound of raindrops falling on a roof. At first, you notice it. Then, after a while, your attention moves to something else and you forget about it. This is what he calls habituation.

How it starts

Tinnitus generally starts with exposure to loud noise. From then on, it’s hard to understand and just as difficult to cure. “The brain does have a plan for loud noise and music. But, for some unfortunate people, these mechanisms don’t work. They become the chronic tinnitus patients,”  Dr Jastreboff explains. “Transient tinnitus is when the ringing comes and goes. To understand it, we have to travel deep into the brain.”

Tune in to Listen up!

Millions of people all over the world suffer from tinnitus. If you’d like to learn more about the condition and how to treat it, tune into the Widex podcast Listen up!

DOES MY CHILD HAVE A HEARING LOSS?

Hearing loss in children is not uncommon. So, when you ask your child repeatedly to help you set the table and he doesn’t respond, it may not just be selective hearing, but the beginning of a hearing loss.

Do you suspect your child has a hearing loss? Learn what to look for in this article.

The signs of hearing loss in children

Your child’s response to sound becomes easier to detect as they get older. Before the age of four months, your baby may widen his eyes, wrinkle his eyebrows or shift his eyes towards the sound. After four months, it gets easier to detect a reaction to the sounds around your child. This is when he starts to move his head towards where the sound is coming from and appears to listen.

If he doesn’t appear to listen, that could be a sign of hearing loss. Other signs that your baby or toddler from four months of age may have a hearing loss is if he:

• Doesn’t react to your voice
• Often seems inattentive
• Shows signs of slow speech development
• By two years, can’t produce spontaneous words or combine 2 words (or more)
• By three years, you, as primary caregiver, don’t understand what he’s saying

Bear in mind, though, that there could be other reasons why he can’t hear well. A cold or an ear infection could cause temporary hearing loss, and the hearing is most often restored when the infection has left the body. In addition, your older child may have a hearing loss if he:

• Often asks “What?” to what you were saying
• Often responds inappropriately in a conversation
• Starts speaking more loudly
• Talks about his “good ear” and his “bad ear”
• Needs very loud TV volume
• Has a teacher who says he’s not paying attention

Hearing helps your child’s speech and language development, social skills and education. For infants, hearing the parents’ voices is also a way of bonding and building trust. So, it’s important to identify hearing problems as early as possible, in order to get the proper treatment.

Getting a professional hearing evaluation for your child

Your child may have gone through a hearing screening as a newborn, but sometimes hearing loss can develop later. If you see signs of hearing loss, you should consult your doctor and get a referral to a hearing care professional. A hearing care professional may carry out different tests, depending on age, to determine whether your child has a hearing loss, and what that potential hearing loss is like. The hearing care professional may perform these tests:

• Visual Audiometry teaches your baby or toddler to link a sound to a visual element. Once your child knows how they are linked, the volume and pitch will be varied to figure out the quietest sounds your baby can hear. This test is common for children from six months to two and half years.
• With headphones on, Play Audiometry teaches your child to carry out a certain task when he hears a specific sound. Once learned, as with the Visual Audiometry, the volume and pitch will be varied. This test is used for young children from one and half to five years.
• Pure Tone Audiometry is for older children, and it’s similar to an adult hearing test. With headphones on, your child will be asked to press a button or raise his hand when he hears a sound.
• The Bone Conduction Test uses a vibrating device put behind the ear to identify which part of the ear isn’t working.
• The Tympanometry Test examines the eardrum’s flexibility to determine if it’s causing a hearing loss.

Based on the test results, the hearing care professional can recommend the proper treatment for your child. Hearing losses associated with colds or middle ear fluid are treated in many ways; sometimes it is as simple as waiting for the child to grow older and the middle ear fluid to resolve naturally. In more severe cases, minor surgery is required to release the fluid. If your child has a hearing loss that is not associated with a cold or middle ear fluid, it may be recommended that he wears hearing aids.

Hearing aids are an important step to improve hearing, also at very young age – even small babies can get hearing aids.

The causes of hearing loss in children

There are a number of reasons for hearing problems among children, and some hearing issues may just be temporary after an ear infection or a cold. Other causes could be:

• A build-up of fluid in the middle ear, which is common in young children (also called glue ear)
• Infections that develop in the womb or at birth and cause progressive hearing loss
• Inherited conditions, such as otosclerosis, which prevent the ears or nerves from working properly
• Damage to the cochlear or auditory nerves – for instance from a serious head injury, exposure to loud noise or head surgery
• Too little oxygen at birth (birth asphyxia)
• Illnesses such as meningitis and encephalitis, both of which involve swelling in the brain

WHY SOME SOUNDS INSTANTLY SCARE US (AT HALLOWEEN)

You might think that you don’t scare easily. But when it comes to scary sounds, you really don’t have a choice. Because it’s all in your biology.

Halloween is coming up! And while well-executed costumes and scary-looking pumpkins can be frightening enough, the creepy sounds of Halloween can truly scare the bejeezus out of us. But sound is really just vibrations – so why do some vibrations trigger instant fear?

It seems that it’s all about biology. You see, our brains have evolved to fear what’s called non-linear sounds. Non-linear sounds are sound waves that have a very high amplitude and a higher volume in comparison with other sounds. They often contain frequency jumps, non-standard harmonies, or chaos and noise – and you can produce them by abruptly changing the frequency of acoustic instruments. Non-linear sounds, like the cry of an animal or a human scream, are scary to us because they extend beyond the normal capacity of the vocal cords. And our brains have evolved to understand the abnormality in these sounds, so we instantly know something is wrong or that there’s danger close by. In fact, our brains react to these sounds so fast that even the brain itself doesn’t know what’s going on until after we’ve reacted. That’s simply a survival mechanism.

DID YOU KNOW?
Hearing is a mechanical sense that travels through only five nerves before you react. The process is over before your brain really has understood what happened.

An extensive study has shown that movies, and in particular horror movies, are full of non-linear sounds that aim to make what we’re watching more captivating. Did the moviemakers intentionally use them to scare us? Probably. But one thing’s for sure: even if images can be dead scary, evolutionary biology has caused us to be more scared of certain sounds. So, if you scare easily, be sure to mute the worst audio scenes of your upcoming Halloween flicks… and enjoy! Muahahaha!

References
It’s Okay To Be Smart
Scienceabc.com
Heartlandhearingiowa.com

HOW AI-POWERED HEARING AIDS CAN HELP YOU HEAR BETTER

You’ve no doubt come across Artificial Intelligence before, but did you know that you can get AI-powered hearing aids to help you personalize your hearing?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used for many things today. It ranges from simple AI that helps suggest your next Netflix movie to complex Machine Learning AI that can predict future outcomes based on what humans have taught it. 

You can train AI-powered hearing aids

Yes, AI can seem quite daunting when you think about how it can effectively predict cancer (more on that below). And a lot of the AI we surround ourselves with today is completely automatized, so we don’t really need to think about it. But there are also AI systems that you can easily train yourself, so that the AI learns. That goes for your hearing aids too – learn more in the video below.

The term AI was coined in the 1950s, and nowadays it’s found in every home. That’s because AI makes our lives a lot easier in many ways. For instance, it’s used to give you recommendations for your next holiday, movie, purchase… you name it.

Essentially, AI is when a system or a machine is trained by humans to carry out a task that a human would be able to do. For instance, finding the fastest route by looking at a map.

With enough training, AI can predict outcomes

The deeper AI system called Machine Learning can predict outcomes based on what humans have taught it.  Although you can never be too sure that the outcome is 100% correct, a study that used Computer Assisted Diagnosis to predict cancer showed that the AI system was able to predict 52% of cancers a year before they were diagnosed by humans. When humans have that kind of information so far in advance, it helps improve treatment.

So, AI can do so many things that help improve our lives, including improving hearing in the moment via hearing aids and apps. But even if AI sometimes seems to be smarter than humans, remember that the system is trained by people, and it will always need humans to give input, keep it updated and set the success criteria.

WHY SHARING OUR HEARING AID SETTING WILL HELP

A new approach to hearing care gives you both better support and hearing care that’s tailored to your specific hearing needs.

A new solution helps you share the sound improvements you make on your phone directly with your hearing care professional. That means you have to do almost nothing – except give your consent once.

How does it work?

If you have a hearing aid that lets you personalize your hearing in the moment through an app on your phone, you’re in luck. Because it’s these personal adjustments you make that make all the difference. With the new technology and the personalization app, you can automatically share information about every sound adjustment you make to improve your hearing with your hearing care professional.

SHARING DATA IS EASY AND SAFE
Data is securely shared between the app on your phone and your hearing care professional’s fitting software, and you can easily give or decline consent to sharing your data and change your mind at any time.

And the next time you’re in the clinic, they can give you more tailored counselling based on the changes they can see you’ve made to your sound in your daily life. Because the person you trust the most with your hearing has now learned even more about how you’d like to hear when you’re out in the real world. That gives them a better foundation for helping you meet your hearing needs.

5 REASONS WHY YOUR HEARING AIDS ARE WHISTLING

Hearing aids whistle sometimes. Just like your phone sometimes does when it’s too close to the radio. Here’s what causes it and what you can do about it.

If you wear hearing aids, you’re going to experience whistling at some point. It can happen through something as simple as putting on a scarf. The whistling is called hearing aid feedback.

How does hearing aid feedback occur?

Hearing aid feedback occurs when sound that was supposed to go into your ear canal leaves your ear and jumps back into the hearing aid microphone. The sound then gets reamplified, and this causes your hearing aids to whistle.

This feedback can happen in different contexts, like when you put your hearing aids on in the morning and take them off in the evening, or when someone hugs you. This is perfectly normal because the hearing aids are reacting to the sound bouncing back from your surroundings.

Hearing aid feedback could also be a sign that something could be wrong with your hearing aids, or they need to be cleaned. In that case it’s best to consult your hearing care professional.

What causes my hearing aids to whistle and what can I do about it?

Many hearing aids come with feedback cancellation, but this doesn’t completely safeguard you from feedback. A number of things can cause your hearing aids to whistle. Here are the most common reasons for feedback and how to resolve it.

1. A poor fit:
Just like the rest of your body, your ears change over time. They may even change shape. If they do, the earmolds become loose and do not seal properly. This means the sound gets away from your ear and jumps back into your hearing aids. And that causes feedback. To fix it, get new earmolds fitted to your ear. Weight gain or weight loss can also affect your ears and the fit of the earmolds.

In general, if your hearing aids are not put properly in your ear, it gives the sound a chance to escape and re-enter the hearing aid microphone, so make sure they are sitting nice and tight in your ear. You can always ask someone to check if it looks correct or see your hearing care professional.

2. Too high volume:
It can sometimes be tempting to turn up the volume on your hearing aids. But turning it up too loud can force the sound to re-enter your hearing aids, which causes whistling. Turn down your hearing aid volume and avoid the point where the sound gets so loud that it creates feedback.

3. Broken tubing:
For some hearing aids, the tube that connects to the earmold can harden and shrink. Sometimes the tubing then starts to pull the earmold, so that it doesn’t have the right fit anymore. That means it’s time to get a new tube.

4. Too much earwax:
Your hearing aids help you hear because they deliver sounds to your ear canal. But if the ear canal is blocked by too much earwax, the sound can’t get through. So, it bounces back into your hearing aids – and that’s when they start to whistle.

If you’ve got excessive earwax, it can also block your ear canal and – in addition to causing problems with your hearing aids – give you earaches or damage your hearing. Get your ears cleaned by a professional and, while you’re at it, make sure that there are no clogged receivers or vents.

5. Dislodged microphones:
Hearing aid feedback can also be caused by loose or displaced microphones. Your hearing care professional can help you resolve this issue.

If you continue to experience problems with hearing aid feedback and can’t figure out the reason, ask your hearing care professional to help you.

THE HISTORY OF HEARING AIDS – FROM THE HEARING TRUMPET TO THE TINY DEVICE BEHIND THE EAR

Today’s hearing aids are far from the ones your granddad wore in the 1960s. And they’re certainly nothing like the imaginative hearing solutions of the early 20th century.

How did we go from hearing trumpets to small, advanced devices?

The 17th century: Hello hearing trumpet

The hearing trumpet was the first real hearing device. It was invented in the 17th century, and it looked just like you imagine it would, like a trumpet. But back then there was no amplification or refining of the sound, and the hearing trumpet couldn’t do a whole lot more than collect the sound and bring it into the ear.

The 19th century: Concealing the trumpet

In the 19th century, the hearing trumpet was rethought. Now the design was adorned with intricate engravings, paint and repoussé work to make it more appealing and to help conceal the hearing loss.

The beautiful acoustic headbands called Aurolese Phones were very popular. But there was also the Acoustic Fan, the Audiophone, the Dentaphone, Acoustic Chairs and even the Beard Receptacle. All were made to help those with hearing loss hear better – and to some extent disguise the device that helped them do so.

At the time, hearing loss was inaccurately associated with other disabilities, and that created a huge stigma for those with hearing loss. That’s why a hearing solution that attempted to conceal the otherwise not-so-discreet hearing device was an attractive option.

1898: Enter the electronic hearing aid

In 1876, the telephone was invented. Now you could get an electronically transmitted sound signal from somewhere else. It took a few years, but before the turn of the century the first electronic hearing aid, the Akouphone, was invented in 1898. Sound could now be amplified using electric current.

The Akouphone consisted of a separate microphone, an amplifier, headphones and a big, bulky battery that only lasted for a couple of hours at a time. Unfortunately, this made it very difficult to use. The device was also expensive, so only few people could afford an Akouphone.

1900s: Electronic hearing aids become smaller (but still not so handy)

In the first part of the 20th century, hearing aids became much smaller. Still, you had to wear the amplifier and the batteries around the neck and the microphone was hand-held. So whoever spoke to you could speak directly into the hand-held microphone – much like how a reporter would use a microphone today.

At this point, the microphone’s size corresponded to the person’s hearing loss. So if your hearing loss was severe, you’d have to carry around a pretty large microphone.

1950s: The transistor radio makes hearing aids easy to wear

The next big revolution in hearing aids came in the middle of the 20th century, shortly after the transistor radio was invented. It didn’t take long before hearing aids could be worn above or behind the ear and were a lot easier to take with you. Now hearing aids started to look like the hearing aids we use today, and from the 1960s you could even get hearing aids that sat inside the ear canal.

1990s: Hearing aids go digital (and smaller again)

Until the 1980s, hearing aid technology was analogue. But then things went digital, and hearing aids could now convert an analogue signal, process it digitally, and then send an analogue signal to the user’s ear.

Digitalizing hearing aids made a huge difference for people with hearing loss. The small programmable computer inside the hearing aid could amplify millions of different sound signals very precisely and improve the sound significantly compared to the analogue hearing aid.

Today: Complete connectivity in discreet designs

In this century, hearing aids are smarter than ever, and many of them can also connect to the internet. What that means is they can use the internet to communicate with your smartphone, your phone or your TV, so you can listen to music, take calls and hear the TV directly into your hearing aid – sometimes using an assistive listening device.

Some hearing aids are so smart that they can predict how you want to hear in a situation, based on your previous hearing aid adjustments. And with the Internet of Things (IoT), your connected hearing aids are even able to communicate with your coffee machine or the lighting in your house.

Even though hearing aids can be super small and discreet, today’s hearing aids are powerful little computers. They process sound automatically to give you the best sound wherever you are, adapting to the environment as you move around. They know when you want to hear speech and when you don’t. Some hearing aids even let you tailor your hearing further through apps on your phone.

Hearing aids have come a long way since the hearing trumpet. From simply transporting sound in the 17th century, today’s hearing aids can make millions of calculations to deliver the best listening experience for the wearer. They make a substantial difference to people with hearing loss, and come in many different models, colors and sizes. There are a lot of options out there – and there’s a hearing aid for you too.

References

www.hear-it.org
www.decibelhearing.com
www.beckerexhibits.wustl.edu
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
www.modernhearing.net