Category Archives: Language : German

This blog’s little sister

Today I’d like to present to you my newest project. It is kind of like this blog, but more like its little sister: https://www.doofe-ohren.de

It is a blog, where I write about hearing, hearing loss and hearing aids. This time it is in German (sorry!) and it is for the beginners. It starts a bit more at the beginning and basically covers everything that I would have liked to have known before I bought my first hearing aids. I hope with this I can encourage people with hearing loss to learn about hearing aids and the technology in and around those.

If you have someone in your environment for which this sounds like an interesting site to visit, do me the favor and spread the word. Thank you!

My take on Hearables

Recently I was interviewed by Peggy Sylopp, head of the research project “Hear how you like to hear“. The project is about people’s view and need of hearables and Peggy gave me the opportunity to express my opinion here. I enjoyed the conversation very much, I hope you do too. Here’s the video (in German):

This was published as part of an article in the “Make” magazine and on heise.de:

https://www.heise.de/amp/hintergrund/liketohear-Ein-Raspi-Prototyp-fuer-individuelle-Hoergeraete-4687101.html?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR0pFYtKZGo6WOHOsqw7W54iujLWFlZ253_x39ysncq_sD3ijGcl8wM6sBI

Talk: Hear how you like to hear

A while ago, I mentioned the research project Hear how you like to hear. The researchers want to find out how users use hearables and what requirements they have for hearables. They have a very human-centered approach, which I like a lot, as it includes that hearing is very subjective and not everything about hearing can be captured in an audiogram.

The project is soon coming to an end. Peggy, the main researcher, gave a talk about the project and the results (the talk is in German, the slides are English). In particular, she found out that 90% of hearing aid users don’t find it important that the devices are small. That is pretty much the opposite of what the hearing aid industry is still selling. Great project, I hope there are more like this in the pipeline.

Apple’s plans to improve support for the hearing impaired

I was recently (and repeatedly ;)) pointed to these news.

My personal opinion is that I am sceptical, if this is really aimed to actually help the hearing impaired or if it is just one piece in the game of patents. Even if this will yield to actual products, it might certainly not make the market any more open (at least with apple’s history, that would surprise me). I hope we do not end up in a scenario where you can only use Apple products with Apple hearing aids.

But maybe I am wrong and Apple will surprise me. We will see. 🙂