Do you find that the TV remote needs to be raised to higher and higher volume levels each time you use it? Are you having difficulty understanding everything that may be said in friends’ conversations? Do you avoid certain noisy restaurants? For those of us who are realizing that we are beginning to have hearing loss, but are not quite ready yet for a hearing device, what are some helpful tools for coping in our daily routines?
Hearing loss is often gradual and easy to ignore. Maybe certain individuals will find it not desirable to wear hearing aids. Though many of us (myself included) may be in denial, struggling to hear can affect our quality of life. So what should we do about the subject? Mark Sanders, a Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary audiologist tells us (April, 2016 Harvard Women’s Health Watch) that it’s important to have a professional do a legitimate diagnostic test to determine if a medical follow-up evaluation by an ear, nose, and throat doctor is necessary. But he does add, “…hearing aids aren’t the only approaches to dealing with a minor hearing loss that isn’t due to an underlying medical condition.” The audiologist suggests the following 6 strategies to “get the most out of a conversation or public event.”
1. Come in for a close-up view. Move within 6 feet to 10 feet of the person speaking and concentrate on his or her face to catch facial cues (mouth and facial expression). Position yourself to see as many people as possible if you are in a group.
2. Put your best ear forward. Try to keep your stronger hearing ear closer to the speaker.
3. Ban shouting. Shouting from another room never really works. If you are having difficulty hearing conversation, ask friends and/or relatives to come into the room you are in to speak to you.
4. Listen up. Pay attention to the speaker’s patterns and style of speech. By following closely the person speaking, words and phrases that might be confusing in the beginning, will become less of a problem with time.
5. Stake out your turf. If at a live performance, sit six rows from the front and in line of the speaker’s face. At a theatre or movies, sit with a good view of the stage. Do not sit under a balcony and avoid sitting by noisy individuals. Try out an assistive listening device if one is available at any form of a performance.
6. Enlist your smartphone. The same Harvard Women’s Health Watch informs us, “By downloading one of several free apps and adding a pair of earbuds or wireless headphones, you can convert your smartphone into an entry-level hearing aid.” The newsletter continues, “All of the apps amplify sounds picked up on your phone’s microphone. Several also have features common to a digital hearing aid — for instance, they can focus on close or distant sounds and adjust levels of background noise.”
As always, it can be helpful to check the internet for more info. Any hearing apps can then be downloaded from the App Store for iPhones or Google Play for Android Phones.
