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Wireless technology is important to me because over and over again I see children in the
clinic who do really well in pristine acoustic situations, but anytime they are in a noisy
situation they fall apart. Their parents tell us over and over again that if they are
at home in the living room they can hear everything but if they have a bunch of friends come over
or a bunch of family members and a lot of people talking at once they fall apart. or
the same thing in the classroom we know that classrooms are really noisy environments often
times. the teachers voice or the center of interest in the classroom is at the same level
or even a little lower in level than the ongoing background noise in the classroom and children
with hearing loss we know that they need this speech to be 15dB above the background noise
in order to be able to hear well and they are just not going to get that kind of acoustic
environment without wireless technology when they just wear their hearing aids in a conventional
fashion. For the past several years we've done quite a lot of research in terms of wireless
technology and we started out with this research where we looked at what we call traditional
systems where the teacher would have a transmitter that was connected to a microphone and located
close to his or her voice and deliver by a radio signal straight into a receiver the
child *** on his or her hearing aid or cochlear implant and in many respects it was like the
child was right by the teachers' voice where the microphone was about 5 to 6 inches away.
So even if the teacher moved a long way away from the child or if there was a lot of noise
the child could still hear really well in that environment. over time these systems
have evolved they worked well several years ago but they developed systems where automatically
as the background noise would increase in the classroom the level of the teacher's voice
would also increase that was delivered to the child's hearing aid or cochlear implant
and that resulted in dramatic improvements in the children's ability to understand speech
recognition in noise almost so much that we expected probably that we hit ceiling levels
of performance and their was no more room for further improvement. Much to our surprise
about a year ago we starting doing research with a new digital wireless system called
the Roger system and the benefit or the improvement that we saw with the Roger system over analog
and dynamic FM was just as great as what we had seen with analog dynamic FM over the traditional
FM systems. We were blown away and we've seen children's performance in noise taking a whole
new level that we never thought we would reach before. One thing that we saw that was a big
surprise in our research with this new Roger digital wireless system is that in background
noise performance would often times would improve by 25 to 35 percentage points at the
higher noise levels compared to what they got with dynamic FM so we we're blown away
by that amount of improvement we had thought that we had reached ceiling levels that we
thought we couldn't take children any higher when then again it was an example of where
we settled for good when we should have been settling for great which was achieved with
the Roger system. In conclusion what I would say and what we really strive to provide at
Heart for Hearing is every single child regardless of age, regardless of whether a child has
already reached a classroom type of environment or if they are at home with their mother all
day our goal is to fit every single child or provide every single child with Roger technology
we know that is one way in which we can help children reach their full potential when they
have hearing loss.