Cell phones and hearing aids are a topic that is really coming up in a lot of discussions lately as those that are deaf and hard of hearing want to get more in on the cell phone generation in terms of ease of use and emergency benefits among others.
Personally I’m not deaf or hard of hearing, though my girlfriend might disagree with that last one. The following is some information that I’ve gathered that puts a face to the problems, technology and accessibility on a smaller scale and one that we’ll delve into further over the coming weeks.

Problems

One of the biggest problems for someone that is hard of hearing and has hearing aids is that cell phones can emit noise that is a radio frequency interference with the hearing aids. What this does is creates a feedback or buzzing sound which we don’t hear but the user of a hearing aid will hear. This can make it extremely difficult to impossible to hear/understand the person you’re trying to talk to.

Technology

The FCC has required since the passage of the 1988 Hearing Aid Compatibility act, which was modified in 2003, that all manufacturers of cell phones must make their phones compatible with hearing aids. The modification was to require ease of access for cell phones. Under the regulations after updating was the fact that manufacturers must provide a hearing aid compatible cell phone.

Accessibility

There are some hearing aids that are can handle cell phones and there are some cell phones which have improved the compatibility with cell phones. There are now some hearing aid compatible accessories and things like adaptor devices and boots that are manufactured to help with hearing aid and cell phone compatibility. There is the option of telecoils for hearing aids which is known as a t switch, which is something that will aid in the hearing sounds form the cell phone. They are sometimes built-in but are an optional part of a hearing aid.

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Tags: Cell Phones, hearing aids

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 11:48 am by Bryan Bradshaw and is filed under Cell Phones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.