The Gadgeteer

I think most hard of hearing people have a collection of gadgets to use for hearing assistance in various situations. One of my gadgets is made by Phonak and is called a Smartlink. I've used this with my hearing aids for a few years now and, for the most part, it does what Phonak claims it can do.

It's a small handheld microphone with a built-in radio transmitter and antenna. Depending on switch settings, the microphone can be directional or omnidirectional. For example, at a dinner party, that means you can focus its attention on a particular speaker or have it pick up all the speakers around the table.

The radio transmitter + antenna beams a signal up to a small sugar-cube sized receiver that attaches to the hearing aid. I have two receivers, one for each hearing aid so I pick up the same signal in each ear (at least, I did before the CI was installed).

It can also be connected by a jack for sound source such as a laptop, TV or telephone. This is great as it means I can walk around the room or even the house while listening to "Jeopardy" and miss very little. Or, if it's "Friday Night Smackdown", nothing at all.

That said, it's obscenely expensive and somewhat over engineered. For example, it has tiny switches that are difficult to see, much less to press. In dim light, you just squeeze away and hope that you have selected the right thing. Other features are a little too 'automagical' for my taste - e.g. a power-saving feature that causes it to shut off after one minute of silence. It's not easy to get it to turn on again. That's very annoying if you are using it with the phone and have been put on hold.

This week, I received an attachment that allows me to connect one of the sugar-cube things to my cochlear implant processor. This attachment is quite easy to use but it does require an tiny battery to power the receiver; presumably, it would put a bit too much of a load on the cochlear implant's built-in battery.

Anyway, I set everything up, connected the transmitter to my computer earphone jack and tried it out. The first selection was from the aforementioned On the Origin of Species.

Absolutely amazing! I could clearly understand every single word of the passage without having to follow the written text at all. I haven't been able to do this with hearing aids alone for years; even if I could 'hear' it in the sense that it was loud enough there was just too much distortion and garbling of speech for it to be understood.

This is encouraging in more than one way. I had not been using the Smartlink as much lately because it became less useful as my hearing deteriorated. So it looks like it will become more useful instead of being an expensive paperweight. And it may provide a way to understand the telephone. There's a big advantage in being able to hear the phone in both ears rather than just one. At this point, I really can't understand the phone.

It's something to work at.