Hearing Loss LIVE!
Hearing Loss LIVE! wishes everyone a good Thanksgiving with whatever works for you.
These large gatherings aren’t easy. If you’re doing it, give yourself a pat on the back. You’re brave enough to swim in noise and cheer and the chance you’ll miss the punchline. It’s full of challenges.
However, here’s to what you do catch and who you can connect with. The ones who make the effort are gold.
Holiday fatigue is a real thing and there is listening fatigue with hearing loss. Put the two together and we have a double whammy. While at noisy holiday gatherings, people who have normal hearing have the ability to filter out background noise and zero in on speech. You may have heard of this as the “cocktail party effect”. Those of us with hearing loss have a harder time filtering noise so we have the “cocktail party problem”, also called “cocktail party deafness”. Conversation in a noisy environment is exhausting!
Let’s talk about remote microphones that work with hearing aids and cochlear implants. Hearing aids are better than ever but they still have limitations. Cochlear implants are great yet they too have their limitations. What are the limitations?
Technology can help those with hearing loss during the holidays. Hearing aids are a great start. Are you getting the most out of your hearing aids and cochlear implants? Smartphone apps are up and coming and can be helpful as well. Using assistive technology can help lighten the load and increase participation for everyone.
Through teaching our lipreading classes, we found that gestures snap in missing words fast and sign language can cue our needs. We have one lesson in Lipreading Concepts that devotes a lot of time to gestures because not all words are visible on the lips. Some words look exactly the same on the lips like “maybe” and “baby”. Luckily gestures can be used for both. The gesture you’re most likely to pick for “baby” is the American Sign Language (ASL) sign for baby. While there are some signs that look like gestures, visual languages have their own structure and grammar. There are a few basic ASL signs anyone can learn to aid communication with each other and the Deaf community. This month, we talk about using gestures and sign language to aid communication.