What's new in hearing aids? From digital technology to implantable, removable and non-invasive solutions, this is not your grandma's hearing aid.
Dr. Jed Kwartler, otologist/neurotologist and director of Summit Medical Group's Ear Specialty Center gives an overview of updates in hearing aid technology and discusses auditory rehabilitation -- maximizing your listening environment - with today's innovations.
Dr. Kwartler gives details on SoundBite, the world’s first removable and noninvasive hearing solution for patients with single-sided deafness or chronic ear canal problems. Summit Medical Group is among the first centers in New Jersey to offer the Soundbite hearing solution. Learn more about this state-of-the-art device with Dr. Kwartler.
Selected Podcast
New Technologies in Hearing Aids
Featured Speaker:
Past President of the New Jersey Academy of Otolaryngology, Dr. Kwartler is a member of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, New Jersey State Hearing Evaluation Council, North American Skull Base Surgery Society, American Neurotology Society, and New Jersey Speech, Language, and Hearing Association. He has been an advisor to the organization, Hearing Education Awareness for Rockers (HEAR).
Ear Specialty Center - Summit Medical Group: Dr. Kwartler
Jed Kwartler, MD
Jed A. Kwartler, MD, is Director of Summit Medical Group Otology/Neurotology. Recognized as a leading ear surgeon in the New York metropolitan area, Dr. Kwartler performed New Jersey's first cochlear implant in a child in 1993. He is an advocate for adults and children who are hard of hearing and he supports hearing testing for newborns. In addition to his position at Summit Medical Group, he is Clinical Associate Professor of Otolaryngology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark.Past President of the New Jersey Academy of Otolaryngology, Dr. Kwartler is a member of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, New Jersey State Hearing Evaluation Council, North American Skull Base Surgery Society, American Neurotology Society, and New Jersey Speech, Language, and Hearing Association. He has been an advisor to the organization, Hearing Education Awareness for Rockers (HEAR).
Ear Specialty Center - Summit Medical Group: Dr. Kwartler
Transcription:
New Technologies in Hearing Aids
Melanie Cole (Host): Are you suffering from progressive hearing loss and you’ve wanted to look into treatments? Well, now’s your chance to hear about them. My guest is Dr. Jed Kwartler. He is a board certified otologist, neurotologist, and director of Summit Medical Group’s Ear Specialty Center. Welcome to the show, Dr. Kwartler. Let’s speak about, first of all, there’s so many different new technology in hearing loss today. Let’s first talk about hearing aids. People have been talking about them for years. They’ve been around for years. Tell us the new technology. What’s going on in the world of hearing aids?
Dr. Jed Kwartler (Guest): The things that have changed with hearing aids are the size of the hearing aid, the length of time you can wear a hearing aid, the digitization of hearing aids, digital circuitry versus what would have been called analog circuitry, and I guess the last thing probably would be battery power. Batteries have gotten smaller, become more powerful, and so they last longer. Because clearly, hearing aids run on batteries that need to be changed. The thing that is probably most interesting about hearing aids, I think, is really the range over which you can now amplify. It used to be a little bit difficult to fit a patient with hearing aids with certain patterns of hearing loss, very steeply dropping hearing loss in the higher frequency range. And now, because of the digital circuitry built in, you can really comfortably help patients with a much wider range of types of hearing loss.
Melanie: Does it increase their ability to hear or are the sounds now coming in at a different frequency? How do hearing aids actually work?
Dr. Kwartler: The simple thing to visualize about a hearing aid is it is an amplifier. That’s why it is called amplification. Hearing aids take in sound. They have a microphone that takes up the sound. Some hearing aids actually have more than one microphone so that you can start to get some directional sense. We usually are wanting to hear sounds that are coming from in front of us and we’re usually not wanting to hear sounds that are coming from the side of us or behind us. So with multiple microphones, you can kind of suppress the unwanted sound. But they have a microphone and then they have speakers. Now, the thing that’s in between the microphone and the speaker is all of the digital manipulation of the sound. So you can suppress certain unwanted sounds. You can boost sounds or frequencies that you want to hear more or where there perhaps are surviving nerve endings in someone’s inner ear or where there’s a better ability to discriminate speech. But basically, hearing aids have e speaker and a microphone and then something in between that manipulates the sounds, certainly makes it louder and digitally filters and does something to it.
Melanie: Wow, that’s amazing. It really truly is. Is there such a thing as audiologic rehabilitation? Can you get any hearing back when you’ve started to lose it?
Dr. Kwartler: There are conditions that are medically treatable, that we can do something to get hearing back when you’ve started to lose hearing. But for the most part, when you talk of auditory rehabilitation, it’s learning to maximize what it is that you have, learning to manipulate the listening environment that you are in. Because there are going to be better and worse listening environments. I’m going to be right up front with your listeners. The biggest complaint patients have when they have hearing loss and when they wear a hearing aid would be a situation like when they go into a restaurant where there is a lot of background noise. That is a challenging environment for someone with hearing loss and for someone who wears hearing aids. But there are things, even there, you can do to manipulate the environment. You can sit closer to walls. You can be in places that have less echo. That actually at least will not enhance but certainly improve the ability to hear in that setting.
Melanie: That’s great advice, Dr. Kwartler, because working with elderly patients that I work with, every single one of them I hear complains about restaurants, the din. When they’re at parties, their grandchildren all running around, they hear all of this at once. So you’ve recommended sitting near a wall because that stops some of the sound cruising around, right?
Dr. Kwartler: Yup.
Melanie: What else can they do?
Dr. Kwartler: Well, they can make sure that the person they are talking to is looking at them. They can make sure that they can see the person’s face that they are talking to, again, going off to the side where they’re in a place that minimizes a lot of the background sound. Those are all things that help to enhance the ability to communicate when there is hearing loss or when you’re using a hearing aid.
Melanie: Well, I think I’m lucky because I have this voice. So everyone I know with hearing loss always tells me I am one of the few people, because of the lower range of my voice, that they can hear without even their hearing aid, and so I don’t have to hear that beep that comes from people when their hearing aids move into the wrong place or they are fiddling with them or the volume. Speak about the SoundBite and some of the devices out there. The SoundBite, what is this, a hearing device?
Dr. Kwartler: The SoundBite is a fairly new hearing device, pretty exciting. It was introduced probably about a year ago now though it had been studied in Europe previously and in smaller study sites around the U.S., but released to the general public in mid-2012. It is for patients with a condition called single-sided deafness. Basically, you hear well out of one ear and you have no hearing whatsoever in the opposite ear. Those patients might lose hearing from an infection, from a virus, from tumor, from trauma, from acoustic trauma, a loud explosive noise. What happens when you don’t hear out of one side, imagine drawing a line down the middle of your body and 180 degrees worth of sound information no longer gets to you. Think about sitting at a dinner table where everyone on one side of you, you don’t hear them. So what SoundBite does is create the ability to pick up sound on that deaf side and transmit it through the use of bone conduction, your skull vibrating to your opposite normal or near normal hearing ear. Now, it does that through a device that you wear in your mouth that actually is a little almost like an Invisalign brace or retainer type device that pops in around your back two molars, and then wearing a small hearing aid that’s the microphone part that picks up the sound and which then transmits it to the mouth device. You’re able to both pick up the sound and then to vibrate the skull. It doesn’t require any surgery. It is very comfortable. You can eat with the device in your mouth, drink with the device in your mouth. There is really no limitation there. It’s a neat little fix for patients with that condition that is called single-sided deafness.
Melanie: Wow! And you use this device yourself. Tell us about your results for this.
Dr. Kwartler: We’ve been able to fit quite a number of patients with this. The alternative to using SoundBite is with something called a bone-anchored hearing aid. But it requires a small operation to place an implant into the skull to retain the hearing vibrator device. And a lot of patients don’t want to have surgery for single-sided deafness. They want something that is removable and doesn’t involve any kind of surgery. Bone conduction is incredibly efficient so any place that you vibrate the skull in transmitting sound to normal hearing, you essentially have normal hearing. So now with a SoundBite device or with a bone-anchored hearing device called BAHA, someone sitting on that deaf side you can hear whispering. You can function around a dinner table, you can function at a business meeting, you can function socially where you just don’t feel so cut off from half the world.
Melanie: Wow! That is really amazing. Now, offer us your best tips and advice for hearing loss and the treatments that are out there, and your really best advice for people suffering from hearing loss.
Dr. Kwartler: Well, I think we covered some of that. Again, I’m going to take five seconds and say, “Be careful around noise.” That’s the number one thing. Don’t use Q-tips. You’re just pushing the wax in. Wax is really common to block off the hearing, so don’t do that. Kinds of medications that have been studied: Omega 3s, something called resveratrol which is grape skin extract have been shown to prevent or limit the progression in age-related hearing loss. If you have an infection, go see a doctor. If you think you have hearing loss, go get your hearing tested because there might be identifiable things that can actually be done to treat it.
Melanie: Well, thank you so much, Dr. Jed Kwartler. You are listening to SMG Radio. You can find out more information at summitmedicalgroup.com. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks for listening.
New Technologies in Hearing Aids
Melanie Cole (Host): Are you suffering from progressive hearing loss and you’ve wanted to look into treatments? Well, now’s your chance to hear about them. My guest is Dr. Jed Kwartler. He is a board certified otologist, neurotologist, and director of Summit Medical Group’s Ear Specialty Center. Welcome to the show, Dr. Kwartler. Let’s speak about, first of all, there’s so many different new technology in hearing loss today. Let’s first talk about hearing aids. People have been talking about them for years. They’ve been around for years. Tell us the new technology. What’s going on in the world of hearing aids?
Dr. Jed Kwartler (Guest): The things that have changed with hearing aids are the size of the hearing aid, the length of time you can wear a hearing aid, the digitization of hearing aids, digital circuitry versus what would have been called analog circuitry, and I guess the last thing probably would be battery power. Batteries have gotten smaller, become more powerful, and so they last longer. Because clearly, hearing aids run on batteries that need to be changed. The thing that is probably most interesting about hearing aids, I think, is really the range over which you can now amplify. It used to be a little bit difficult to fit a patient with hearing aids with certain patterns of hearing loss, very steeply dropping hearing loss in the higher frequency range. And now, because of the digital circuitry built in, you can really comfortably help patients with a much wider range of types of hearing loss.
Melanie: Does it increase their ability to hear or are the sounds now coming in at a different frequency? How do hearing aids actually work?
Dr. Kwartler: The simple thing to visualize about a hearing aid is it is an amplifier. That’s why it is called amplification. Hearing aids take in sound. They have a microphone that takes up the sound. Some hearing aids actually have more than one microphone so that you can start to get some directional sense. We usually are wanting to hear sounds that are coming from in front of us and we’re usually not wanting to hear sounds that are coming from the side of us or behind us. So with multiple microphones, you can kind of suppress the unwanted sound. But they have a microphone and then they have speakers. Now, the thing that’s in between the microphone and the speaker is all of the digital manipulation of the sound. So you can suppress certain unwanted sounds. You can boost sounds or frequencies that you want to hear more or where there perhaps are surviving nerve endings in someone’s inner ear or where there’s a better ability to discriminate speech. But basically, hearing aids have e speaker and a microphone and then something in between that manipulates the sounds, certainly makes it louder and digitally filters and does something to it.
Melanie: Wow, that’s amazing. It really truly is. Is there such a thing as audiologic rehabilitation? Can you get any hearing back when you’ve started to lose it?
Dr. Kwartler: There are conditions that are medically treatable, that we can do something to get hearing back when you’ve started to lose hearing. But for the most part, when you talk of auditory rehabilitation, it’s learning to maximize what it is that you have, learning to manipulate the listening environment that you are in. Because there are going to be better and worse listening environments. I’m going to be right up front with your listeners. The biggest complaint patients have when they have hearing loss and when they wear a hearing aid would be a situation like when they go into a restaurant where there is a lot of background noise. That is a challenging environment for someone with hearing loss and for someone who wears hearing aids. But there are things, even there, you can do to manipulate the environment. You can sit closer to walls. You can be in places that have less echo. That actually at least will not enhance but certainly improve the ability to hear in that setting.
Melanie: That’s great advice, Dr. Kwartler, because working with elderly patients that I work with, every single one of them I hear complains about restaurants, the din. When they’re at parties, their grandchildren all running around, they hear all of this at once. So you’ve recommended sitting near a wall because that stops some of the sound cruising around, right?
Dr. Kwartler: Yup.
Melanie: What else can they do?
Dr. Kwartler: Well, they can make sure that the person they are talking to is looking at them. They can make sure that they can see the person’s face that they are talking to, again, going off to the side where they’re in a place that minimizes a lot of the background sound. Those are all things that help to enhance the ability to communicate when there is hearing loss or when you’re using a hearing aid.
Melanie: Well, I think I’m lucky because I have this voice. So everyone I know with hearing loss always tells me I am one of the few people, because of the lower range of my voice, that they can hear without even their hearing aid, and so I don’t have to hear that beep that comes from people when their hearing aids move into the wrong place or they are fiddling with them or the volume. Speak about the SoundBite and some of the devices out there. The SoundBite, what is this, a hearing device?
Dr. Kwartler: The SoundBite is a fairly new hearing device, pretty exciting. It was introduced probably about a year ago now though it had been studied in Europe previously and in smaller study sites around the U.S., but released to the general public in mid-2012. It is for patients with a condition called single-sided deafness. Basically, you hear well out of one ear and you have no hearing whatsoever in the opposite ear. Those patients might lose hearing from an infection, from a virus, from tumor, from trauma, from acoustic trauma, a loud explosive noise. What happens when you don’t hear out of one side, imagine drawing a line down the middle of your body and 180 degrees worth of sound information no longer gets to you. Think about sitting at a dinner table where everyone on one side of you, you don’t hear them. So what SoundBite does is create the ability to pick up sound on that deaf side and transmit it through the use of bone conduction, your skull vibrating to your opposite normal or near normal hearing ear. Now, it does that through a device that you wear in your mouth that actually is a little almost like an Invisalign brace or retainer type device that pops in around your back two molars, and then wearing a small hearing aid that’s the microphone part that picks up the sound and which then transmits it to the mouth device. You’re able to both pick up the sound and then to vibrate the skull. It doesn’t require any surgery. It is very comfortable. You can eat with the device in your mouth, drink with the device in your mouth. There is really no limitation there. It’s a neat little fix for patients with that condition that is called single-sided deafness.
Melanie: Wow! And you use this device yourself. Tell us about your results for this.
Dr. Kwartler: We’ve been able to fit quite a number of patients with this. The alternative to using SoundBite is with something called a bone-anchored hearing aid. But it requires a small operation to place an implant into the skull to retain the hearing vibrator device. And a lot of patients don’t want to have surgery for single-sided deafness. They want something that is removable and doesn’t involve any kind of surgery. Bone conduction is incredibly efficient so any place that you vibrate the skull in transmitting sound to normal hearing, you essentially have normal hearing. So now with a SoundBite device or with a bone-anchored hearing device called BAHA, someone sitting on that deaf side you can hear whispering. You can function around a dinner table, you can function at a business meeting, you can function socially where you just don’t feel so cut off from half the world.
Melanie: Wow! That is really amazing. Now, offer us your best tips and advice for hearing loss and the treatments that are out there, and your really best advice for people suffering from hearing loss.
Dr. Kwartler: Well, I think we covered some of that. Again, I’m going to take five seconds and say, “Be careful around noise.” That’s the number one thing. Don’t use Q-tips. You’re just pushing the wax in. Wax is really common to block off the hearing, so don’t do that. Kinds of medications that have been studied: Omega 3s, something called resveratrol which is grape skin extract have been shown to prevent or limit the progression in age-related hearing loss. If you have an infection, go see a doctor. If you think you have hearing loss, go get your hearing tested because there might be identifiable things that can actually be done to treat it.
Melanie: Well, thank you so much, Dr. Jed Kwartler. You are listening to SMG Radio. You can find out more information at summitmedicalgroup.com. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks for listening.