subject: Get Up Close And Personal If You Have Trouble Hearing [print this page] Get Up Close And Personal If You Have Trouble Hearing
If you are hard of hearing the closer you are to the speaker's mouth the easier it will be for you to hear. If only 2 feet separates you from the speaker, then the mathematics are, - you will only hear a quarter of what is said, but this loss of sound increases exponentially if you are 8 feet away you can only hear 1/64 of what you can hear closer and that distance can make dramatic differences for deaf people. The more distance increases between people the more background noises get in the way and these can drown the speaker's voice to say nothing of coughing, shuffling, people talking and any number of extraneous noise factors. Hearing aids don't actually help over distance because they amplify background noises.Speech is distorted over distance because the sound waves reflect off certain hard surfaces. The further away you are the more these distortions are magnified. To eliminate these distortions move closer. You need to understand high-frequency sounds to be able to understand speech and these are distorted more than low-frequency sounds over distance. So whilst you may hear people talking it will be difficult to understand what they are saying.There are two ways of getting closer to people the first is physical closeness and the second is electronic close.Get Physically Close This is only possible in one-to-one conversations it is harder to do in a group. Get Electronically Close To be able to get electronically close to someone you need an assistive listening device with a microphone close to the speaker's mouth. The high-frequency sounds drop away very quickly over distance but if they are captured by a microphone close to the speaker's mouth they can pick up all the high-frequency sounds before they diminish over distance. With assistive devices you can hear the sound as clearly as your damaged ears will allow. You have eliminated distance excluded background noise and eliminated distortion and it doesn't get any better than that for the hard of hearing.Hearing aids don't have the same effect because the microphone is located at your ears not speaker's mouth. Which is why those with hearing aids benefit from assistive listening devices if they go to a concert or they are hearing from a distance? A t- coil can make the world of difference to a deaf person. Not only can they hear better but they don't have to focus on lip reading as wellIn conclusion distance is the main enemy of the hard of hearing the extra sounds that they pick up a magnified whilst the sounds they need to hear are diminished over a short distance but completely lost over a large distance. Many public places have assistive listening devices it pays to ask.
