Scientists have found what could be the root cause of tinnitus, raising the hope of a treatment in the near future. In studies carried out by Scientists in Australia, increased activity in the auditory brainstem where sounds are processed were found and linked to changes in the genes involved in regulating the activity of the nerve cells.  Pathways that normally keep a lid on nerve signal transmission were blocked and others were more excitable than usual. Although this research was carried out on guinea pigs, the team believe their findings will ultimately help people with tinnitus. Lead researcher Professor Don Robertson said, “Identifying genes associated with spontaneous nerve cell activity is crucial. It means that it may be possible to use drugs to block this activity and treat conditions such as tinnitus in the future.”

From Audio-Infos

Related posts:

1. The drug that could end the misery of tinnitus

I’m now on Twitter, so you have one more place where you can listen to me bitch and rant. I’ll be posting snippets of hearing aid related news that don’t warrant a post on here and no doubt some other stuff too, no idea what yet though, let’s see how it goes…

Follow me on Twitter.

A drug pump which is implanted in the ear is the latest approach for tackling tinnitus. It works by releasing a powerful new medicine that calms the overactive nerves thought to cause the condition.

Tinnitus is a ringing, whistling, buzzing or hissing noise heard for no obvious reason. It may be constant, or come and go.

It is estimated that about 15million people in the UK experience tinnitus at some time. For 10 to 15 per cent of sufferers, the condition is so loud and debilitating it affects sleeping and concentration. It has also been linked to depression and anxiety.

Tinnitus is linked to a number of factors, and can be a side-effect of some medication. It is estimated there are more than 200 medicines, including aspirin, that can cause it. Known as ototoxic medications, these drugs have the potential to damage the delicate structure of the inner ear, causing temporary or permanent hearing problems.

Tinnitus may also be the result of nerves in the ear sending faulty messages. This may be the result of a brain chemical called glutamate causing the nerve cells to become hyperactive.

Tinnitus is often linked to hearing loss – some scientists believe that when hearing is damaged in some way, by exposure to loud noise for example, there is excessive production of glutamate.

The high levels of the chemical then trigger excessive nerve firing, or hyperactivity, which results in the sufferer hearing sounds that aren’t actually there.

Although there is no cure for tinnitus, there are products available to mask the sound.

Patients may also be offered tinnitus retraining therapy, which is based on the idea that the nervous system can be trained to regard the noise as insignificant.

The new therapy, developed by U.S.-based company NeuroSystec, uses a drug known as NST-001.

Read this article in full at the Daily Mail.

Related posts:

1. Tinnitus Cure ‘is a step closer’

From a Hansaton press release:

January 11, 2010 – Hansaton, the German-based provider of award-winning hearing systems, announced today they are now offering their products to US-based audiologists and hearing aid dispensers.  Hansaton (hanz-a-tone) has designed and manufactured superior hearing devices for more than fifty years. The family-owned company currently has licensed dealers in 70 countries worldwide. Hansaton recently named industry veteran Robert Eastman as President and CEO of Hansaton-USA.

“Hearing device experts around the world know that Hansaton products offer world-class technology, designed in the great tradition of German engineering. But not everyone knows we offer much more than that,” said Eastman. “There are many excellent hearing assistance products to choose from.  Hansaton has created a value equation that combines the finest hearing devices in the world with exemplary customer service, simple pricing and ordering systems and efficient operations. That’s really how we differentiate ourselves.”

Hansaton’s products include a full range of hearing systems to address virtually any hearing loss and stylistic preference. These systems include multiple sizes of Behind-the-ear (BTE) instruments, In-the-ear (ITE) instruments from full-concha to completely -in-the-canal and the latest receiver-in-the-canal (RIC) instruments with three available power levels.  Hansaton’s hearing systems for adults and children include the award winning VELVET, first-class technology with a sophisticated appearance in an attractive design housing.  Hansaton’s products are also fully wireless-enabled, with the latest in Bluetooth connectivity, stereo wireless listening and ear-to-ear control.

Hansaton products will be sold in the United States through audiologists and hearing aid dispensers. On all hearing instruments Hansaton is providing a comprehensive three-year product warranty along with many other features that come standard.

For more information visit www.hansaton-usa.com, email info@hansaton.com or call at 888.984.7432.

Analogue and digital hearing aids are very, very different things. Analogue aids use older and simpler technology. If you are a long-term analogue user and you are having problems hearing well with new digital aids then try this:

Ask your audiologist to turn off noise reduction on your digital aids, if they can’t turn it off completely then at least have then reduce it to an absolute minimum.

The problem is that analogue aids amplify all sounds in the same way and as a long-term analogue wearer you are used to this, you are hearing voices nice and loud but doors closing and traffic noise is also loud, but your used to that and it’s fine. When you switch to a digital aid with noise reduction everything is suddenly much quieter, the aid reduces the volume of the closing door and the traffic, which for most people is great, but for you is not – your brain is used to loud. powerful sounds and cannot cope with the new quiet sounds.

If you ask your audiologist to re-programme your digital aids to be more like analogue then you should be able to hear as you did before.

I’m like this, I wore analogue aids for years and I wasted at least six months trying different digital aids and being very frustrated by not being able to her anyone talking with any of them. Turned out that it wasn’t the new aids at all, it was just the my audiologist at the time was using the default programme with full noise-reduction. I still wear digital aids today with very little active noise reduction.

Wean yourself off the noise

It would be very good for you if you gradually increased the noise reduction on your aids over time, to try and train yourself to listen and understand with noise reduction active, you’ll have a much better hearing experience. People say it takes anything from two to six months to do it, I still haven’t!

If you like what you see, share it so others can benefit

A live demonstration of Sony’s new subtitle glasses took place in London this week, with positive reports from attendees. Tom Fiddian from Action on Hearing Loss – formerly the Royal National Institute for Deaf People – attended the event and reported via Twitter (@tomfiddian and hash tag #Subtitleglasses).The first slide presented was of actor Tom Hanks wearing a prototype of the glasses at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2009. This first generation of glasses was for text only in cinemas. The next generation of glasses can display images and send audio, and Fiddian suggests has the possibilities of being used as user interfaces for mobile phones.

It was this generation that was trialled in the USA and received positive feedback from the deaf community. One comment was that they were “better than a hearing aid.”

The subtitle glasses are wirelessly connected and can transmit over seven channels with each channel running up to 6 different languages. At only 79g and with a 6-hour battery life, the glasses offer a lightweight, long-lasting alternative for viewing captioned movies. View a photo of the glasses and some basic specifications.

As the text ‘hovers’ in front of the viewer, there are three distance settings as well as two text size settings. There are also five levels of brightness which adjust automatically to the conditions.

The receiver, which is wired to the glasses can transmit either captions to the glasses or audio to headphones, but it can’t do both. For patrons that already wear glasses, the subtitle glasses are designed to sit over your own glasses. A 3D clip-on solution is also being developed.

Read the full article at yourlocalcinema.com.au.

Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is the process of converting speech to text in real-time, it is not only useful to the deaf and hard of hearing, it can also help those whose first language is different to the one being used. CART is used in law courts, theatre, presentations and many other places to display a speaker’s words on a screen; it is also used to provide closed captions for live television programs.

TV programs captioned using CART appear in the same way as those whose captions were created before the broadcast, typically with the text at the bottom of the screen. Whereas the pre-made captions will match the spoken words verbatim and appear in sync, CART captions may be a second or so after the spoken word and may contain some errors.

How CART is performed

Obviously the text produced with CART needs to be shown as quickly as possible so that the reader can keep up with the proceedings, but an accurate representation of the spoken words is also needed for reader comprehension. Individuals and companies who offer CART services will use a stenography machine (also known as stenotype or shorthand machine) to convert the spoken words into a shorthand notation that is then converted into readable text for display. The shorthand notation that is produced will have one letter or symbol representing one of more words, making it much quicker to type than the full English representation.

Becoming a certified CART provider is no mean feat and can take years of practice, certified providers can convert around 260 words per minute with a 98% accuracy.

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 a voice recognition system and even back then they were near perfect – they can only have gotten better since then.

The thing with speech recognition software that wouldn’t lend itself to captioning is that you have to train them. You are asked to say certain words and sentences and the software records your voice and learns what you sound like. It then uses what it learns to make such a good job of turning voice into text.

Does anyone know if there’s anything out there (website or PC software) that captions videos automatically for you?

I’m looking into the possibility of trying to write something to do this and I don’t want to bother if it’s already been done. I think it would be possible to write something that listens to a video playing through once and produces some text. That text is not going to be perfect because there has been no learning but it might be good enough to produce captions that are usable.

Want to add a bit of pizzazz to your hearing aid? Does your child wear hearing aids and love jewellery? Stuck for a gift idea for the aid wearer in your life?

Hayleigh’s Cherished Charms is just the thing for you!

Here’s Hayleigh explaining her awesome product and how it came about:

Hi!  I’m Hayleigh and I am 11 years old.  When I was little and attended a school for hearing impaired children I noticed that a lot of kids tried to hide their hearing aids behind their hair.  I wanted to make my hearing aids shine and be fancy and proud of my hearing aids.

I started drawing pictures along with my sisters showing how I could make my hearing aids shine.  My mom helped me make our designs into jewelry for my hearing aids and they were so fancy.  Other kids and adults started wanting them too!

And so with the help of my mom and dad, I started my own little business… Hayleigh’s Cherished Charms.  I have my own work area at my house where my sisters and I make all the jewellery. I even have a provisional patent on my creations and will have a full patent soon!

My patented clasp ideas, hearing aid scrunchies, and tube twists are made so that little hands can use them and the designs hanging from the clasps face forward for all to see.

My sisters and I also make regular earrings because sometimes a mom or sister who doesn’t have hearing aids or cochlear implants wants to match their child / sister / brother who is wearing the charms. Yes, we have charms for boys…and even for adults!

Whenever someone buys a hearing aid they have a trial period in which they can decide whether they want to keep the hearing aid or not. If you are buying a hearing aid and aren’t offered a trial period then shop somewhere else.

Normally the way the trial works is that you pay up-front in full for your hearing aid and you take it away. You get an amount of time for the trial and at the end of that you can give it back or keep it. During the trial period you would go back to the audiologist and make any tweaks to the aid’s programme to get it just right for you.

This is good in that the hearing aid is trialed in the buyer’s normal environment – at home, at work, etc, etc.

One thing I don’t like about this is that the money has to be paid in full up front. Of course, the vendor cannot allow you to walk out with an expensive piece of equipment – they’d probably never see you again. So the vendor has to protect their interest, but what about the buyer? It’s scary to have to part with that amount of money and not be sure that you even want the product. Will the vendor definitely give you your money back? It’s scary.

For first time hearing aid wearers it may take them a long time to build up the courage to actually wear their new aid outside. If they don’t start wearing it straight away they are losing trial time.

What I think happens a lot is that someone gets pressure to go and visit an audiologist, buys a hearing aid, never really wears it during the trial and then because it is not configured properly for them never wears it again. Waste of money. Waste of hearing aid.

I think the trial process could be broken up into separate stages to help, in particular, first time wearers.

The software demo

A hearing aid is really about the software inside it. The quality of sound it produces, the noise it limits, etc. It would be great if audiologists could fit people during visits with a basic ear mould that would run the hearing aid software they are thinking of buying.

The audiologist has all the programming software for each aid – why not have the actual aid software too? When someone visits and wants to try a particular aid they can simply pop a generic throw-away hearing aid into their ear, select the hearing aid of choice and then play some common sounds. The buyer can then experience, possibly for the first time, what a hearing aid sounds like.

Are some vendors already doing this?

Time-limited hardware

Once a hearing aid has been selected does someone have to pay up-front for it there and then? I don’t think so. How about the audiologist fitting the buyer with a basic hearing aid mould in which the software is time limited? I.e. the hearing would work perfectly but after say 3 weeks it simply shuts off. It would be a less scary option for the buyer, given them a real world trial and costing the vendor nothing.

What do you think? Are current trials OK? When you buy a hearing aid are you happy to lay out a lot of money up front?