hearing aids for APD?

[rosebee]

Has anyone used hearing aids to help their Auditory Processing?

I have an audiologist who is suggesting low-gain digital hearing aids with directional microphones & a noise-reduction program to help me hear better in noisy situations.

Before I go down this route, I wanted to see if anyone else had experience with this.

Comments

[danamongden]

I tried this back in 2006 or 2007, and it was an abysmal failure. However, I'm not convinced I was using the right stuff.

What they gave me was a system with an earpiece and a lapel microphone. I would put the lapel microphone on the person speaking, and I had the earpiece on the ear most problematic for noise issues. From the literature, this was designed for a classroom environment where the teacher would wear the mic while the student wore the earpiece.

Alas, it failed terribly. From my LJ at the time:
First of all, it hurts after wearing for a while. I was worried about this ahead of time, and I raised it as a serious objection to the reseller's technician for any system that approached the ear canal instead being a purely external speaker. She assured me that it wouldn't hurt. Well, it does. It's possible that it's not fit quite right and needs an adjustment. I'll be going in Thursday morning for that. I'm particularly annoyed on that front since there was an alternative that would have used a purely external speaker, and I let her talk me out of it, believing her that this particular solution wouldn't hurt the way that ear buds hurt.

Secondly, it simply doesn't work well. The system I got to try down at the UT lab made a night vs. day difference. Instead of picking the person's voice out from all the noise, it was like the noise was gone and the person was speaking softly directly into my ear. However, the one I have is nothing like that at all. I'm still picking up all the noise, and the incoming sound is scratchy, intermittent, and so soft I can't really hear it. In fact, my experience so far is that I hear better without the hearing aid than I do with it.

I considered these possible problems:
Possible points of failure:
1) The microphone isn't picking up the speaker's voice very well. This is possible, and I can try a variety of different microphone placements to see how it goes. However, the ultimate solution (a headset microphone) is impractical for settings like a restaurant where the other speaker needs to eat. Still, I'm pretty sure this isn't all of it. I was able to feed an audio signal in directly from my CD player, and it still came through with noticeable distortion.

2) The brain of the system is being too smart for its own good. Many times, the voice I hear coming through is patchy, where I don't hear the vowels or hard consonants, but I do pick up the soft consonants like S and L. I'm wondering if some kind of internal signal processing is clamping down on the louder parts of the voice signal and robbing me of the full voice.

3) The radio signal is not getting through, either through problems at the transmitter or receiver. It's possible I'm getting interference or that the antennas just aren't working as they're supposed to, even though they're rated for significantly greater distances.

4) The tiny speaker is not capable of reproducing the sound in sufficient fidelity.

5) The small ear-unit does nothing to block out the other background noise, which is at the root of my problem.

And then I finally returned it:
My visit with the hearing aid clinician boiled down to, "Well, that's as good as it gets." It was fit correctly, so the discomfort and pain are the best I could achieve with that style of hearing aid, and the sound quality was as good as I could expect. She listened to it and said that all wireless FM systems have that level of noise and static, but since many FM systems are tied into other hearing aids, for most patients it's a step up from crappy hearing to poor hearing. For me, it was a step from good hearing masked by noise to good hearing masked by more noise.

Ultimately, the real problem may have been that the folks who sold & serviced the hearing aids were unfamiliar with APD and rather unsympathetic to the problems I was reporting. There had been a much older system at the diagnostic lab that worked beautifully. It was big and clunky, but I'd have put up with that. Alas, I was never able to locate one.

What system are they suggesting for you?

[rosebee]

Actual real hearing aids, not an FM system.

My audiologist says she recommends FM system for children, but low-gain hearing aids for adults. If they can be strong & clear enough to help someone with a quantifiable hearing loss, then they should certainly help me out!

All I need is for the person 3 feet in front of me to be louder than the dang background noise around and behind me!

The person I'm getting it from is the local expert in APD (PortlandAPD.com). She says she sells Oticon Hit Pro ($2k/pair), Oticon Vigo Pro ($4k/pair), and Oticon Agil Pros ($6k/pair). She's going to let me take a demo pair and wander around the medical office building for an hour or so to see if they help. Then if/when I buy a pair, I have 30 days to return them for full price no-questions-asked.

[kisekileia]

This definitely sounds worth a try, since you're getting them from an APD pro. It's also possible that the technology has advanced in the past four years.

[rosebee]

I've got an appointment for Nov 11th, I'm eager to see how it goes, and what options there are.

[rosebee]

Which reminds me, my partly deaf great-aunt taught me an awesome trick; she has a bit of APD because hearing aids aren't that good at filtering either. So when someone's talking to her, she now says "Whisper in my ear, darling, it's more intimate. I promise to look shocked."

I LOVE it!! That is an awesome trick of your great-aunt!

[kailen]

I had an FM system for a few years in school too. It sort of helped, in that it made the teacher louder than the background noise, but I still couldn't really understand the teacher clearly. And it didn't do anything to help with hearing/understanding other students.

I'm curious to hear if/how well regular hearing aids would help. It would be really nice to have something that could filter out background noise for me.

[rosebee]

I'm definitely going to go talk to her & give it a shot.

I see her on Nov 11th, so I'll let everyone know how it goes!