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Build Your Own Bluetooth Hearing Aid
CloudShape writes "I've been trying to find a way to make a mobile phone work with my hearing aids for some years now, and I finally managed it a few days ago. Although the procedure itself is pretty simple, the surrounding issues are good for quite a bit of discussion."
Imagine the possilbities for bluejacking!
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Bluetooth is an important add-on to cellular technology because as hearing aid users clearly realized right from the start, there's a lot of RF coming out of that little thing! We hear about all of these questionable health risks... why are we even taking the chances?
Can I hear you now? Wait, did I load the kernel module? Hello? DAMN IT!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
You'll actually need that tinfoil hat.
Now some punk kid can bluejack your ear.
The potential for fun is boundless...
I can't read this article, I'm blind!
What a neat project. I've been thinking about the same problem for a while because my Great-uncle is going deaf. He takes out his hearing aids when he talks on a conventional phone (remember back in the day when you used to be able to get those big bowl-looking things that fit over the ear-piece to help make up for the abscence of the hearing aid?), but using a mobile phone is impossible becaues of the RFI.
He is pretty old, so we would feel a lot more comfortable if he could have a phone with him at all times. I can't wait to try to build one of your devices for him.
... turning to the 3-D map, we see an unmistakable con
Effectively, this solution is working because bluetooth uses a much lower power RF signal so the wire is not interfered with... he's just built himself a custom connection so that a hearing aid can be connected to the bluetooth tranciever.
So really, all that really needs to be on the market for this to be a mainstream solution are A: Bluetooth adapters that connect to the phone and have a standard 2.5 mm output, and then B: an adaptor to convert that to a hearing aid-friendly conector. It'd have the side effect of letting all of us also connect our favorite handsfree piece to the phone by Bluetooth
toothing with your ear piece! ouch.
I found it quite humorous, really, clicking on a page about hearing aides and getting visually yelled at.
I couldn't hear those instructions, either, because they're freaking words!
Keep your eyes to the sky.
It looks like the cell phone communicates with a Bluetooth transceiver which is in turn connected to the hearing aid with a cord. Why not just hook the cell phone to the hearing aid by a cord and skip the Bluetooth part? Alternately, how about a headset hooked to the cell phone coupled acoustically to the hearing aid.
Of course, the goal would be to have a Bluetooth enabled hearing aid. I haven't found a cheap way to develop for Bluetooth. The development kits are very expensive. Any suggestions?
That you RTFA. This is /. after all. But if you did you would have seen:
No amount of extension cable will make a wired hands-free usable - the wire always conducts enough RFI to cause trouble, regardless of any filters that might be in place.
So connecting the phone directly to the hearing aid via a wire isn't an option.
SteveM
The RFI filter needs to be on the hearing aid end.
But does it double as a remote control for Videolan?
C li cker/
http://homepage.mac.com/jonassalling/Shareware/
Actually, I did read the fine article.
1 - The frequency the cell phone operates on (minimum 800 MHz) is far too high to propagate along an earphone cord. In any event, filtering it would be EASY.
2 - If the rf coupled to the cord near the hearing aid, then the cord attached to the Bluetooth device would couple just as badly as one connected to the cell phone itself.
If something is coupling from the cell phone via the cord, it is almost certainly happening at a lower frequency. Maybe there is an inverter that supplies a high voltage for the display. (just conjecture but something like that would do it.)
I currently spend a major amount of time designing micro-strip and have been doing RF in general for forty years. That said, you can always assemble a set of circumstances that causes strange things to happen. In this case, I wouldn't bet money on the problem being RFI per se. Getting GHz rf down a random piece of wire just isn't likely.
When my AT&T TDMA Cell phone rings or I am on a call in my house, all the speakers in my house including those on my computer, TV and Surround Sound system get a large amount of interference. There is even a "blip" of interference when I send a SMS message. Because I also have a Verizon CDMA phone and my wife has a AT&T GSM phone, I know that these phones do not cause the same interference. I wonder if the TDMA protocol puts out signifigantly more RF Interference than others or if that interference produced is simply on a wavelength that is more noticeable since it interferes with most speakers. Anyone?
I don't wear those standard/common ones that go on the ears. Mine is the bone conduction type with a headband since I do not have ear canals. I wonder how difficult it is to do this for this type of hearing aid.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I was wondering if this guy has considered selling/giving his idea to the manufacturer of the bluetooth headset. This could always lead to a nice job offer later.
On another note, does anyone know where to get that faceplate for the T68i in the following picture?
http://www.gfern.com/btha/btha-complete.jpg
I have a moderate hearing loss, and have found that using cellular phones with my hearing aides is nearly impossible. I look forward to this technology and hope that it will eventually lead towards my being able to use my hearing aids and cell phone simultaneously. There are a few things that I have found work moderately well to compensate for the interference. I have a clamshell cell phone, a Samsung x-427. The clamshell design helps keep the antenna another couple of inches away from the hearing aide, and its enough to make a conversation tolerable. My old phone was a non-clamshell Nokia, and its interference was horribly bad. My hearing aids also have a background noise canceling feature that, when I turn it on, takes out quite a bit of interference. Unfortunately it also makes understanding conversations harder. I am left with having to take out my aids completely to talk on the phone. its quite annoying. For those of you who wonder exactly what the interference sounds like, check out http://commerce.motorola.com/consumer/QWhtml/acces sibility/hearingAid.html
there are a few .wav files on this page which sound very familiar to me. Imagine those sounds blaring over every conversation on your phone. It gets to be where you just cant tolerate it anylonger.
To my knowledge, only Nokia has an attachment for their phones to allow for use of the Telecoil. Information is at http://www.nokiaaccessibility.com/loopset.html.
If anybody out there has used one of these, i'd love to hear your testimonial on how they work...
Garth
" The headset could be beaming signals to Mars somewhere above 8kHz, and I would never know... "
crap, this guy is trying to get us all to build this to improve communications back to his home planet
That is a disclaimer skilly. They are ALWAYS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS. I don't know why, I guess thats what lawyers tell people to do, plus, thats the way I have always done it.
And for those you you who are reading impaired and only like pictures: http://www.gfern.com/btha/
34 posts and not one response on how he was originally designing this for 50 pounds for patentable hardware?!?!? This is /. isn't it?
one of these babies, plus a microphone inserted behind one of your front teeth. throw in some voice activation and you'll never have to take the phone out of your pocket.
This is pretty cool, but what is really the minimum possible size for a Bluetooth device? Could one really fit into a earplug sized device. In high school I had to do a lot of memorized poetry recitation for English classes and fantacized about such a thing. :)
No! I'm deaf!
That lame story about Bush's guard records being "inadvertently" destroyed!
....
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
What kind of dumbass BOZO's are going to believe that one?
Un-FUCKING-believable!
What the hell is in those records? What did Wumpass really do that it has to stay hidden no matter how many stupid stories have to be concocted to cover-up their cover-up?
Was Bush caught sucking his own dick behind the aircraft hanger?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I found it quite humorous, really, clicking on a page about hearing aides and getting visually yelled at.
Maybe it's his revenge.
Go grab those torrents.
I'm going to jam a tinfoil hat so far up your ass it will be nearly as deep as your head is right now.
I wear two Resound Canta 7's HA's and the speaker phone on my treo 600 is usually good enough. Kind of sucks if you're in public and want to keep some measure of privacy though.
_ wo rlds_first_bluetooth_for_hearing_instruments
This looks neat too.
The world's first Bluetooth for hearing instruments:
http://www.gn.com/gn_magazine/2002/november/the
Bluetooth in the HA's themselves would be pretty neat. I could zot MP3's straight into my head.
Might be asking a bit much given the space restrictions though.
Now I'd really get a kick out of it if this guy had hacked a vibrator to bluetooth!
"Can you hear me now?"
"Good!"
It would be a cool idea. No more getting the headphone cord tangled or accidently yanked. Especially for portable music players etc. Anyone know if such a thing is available anywhere? And ironically using them at loud volumes may eventually lead to the bluetooth hearing aid.
My wife has lost most of her hearing in her left ear and is now losing that of her right ear as well. Her hearing loss fluctuates (often changing drastically within an hour). She now has two digital hearing aids, which help tremendously, but she is having difficulty with both her cell & land line phone. This article couldn't have come at a more opportune time, as we were investigating various telephone solutions earlier this evening. Losing your hearing is frightening and you can't imagine what a morale booster it is for her to see articles like this one, just to know that someone is working on the very problem you have.
I think an entire Slashdot section could be devoted to "assistive" devices, such as hearing aids/cochlear implants. For those who are interested, there is an excellent article about cochlear implants by Philipos C. Loizou in the Sept. 1998 issue of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine - the title is "Mimicking the Human Ear".
Thanks.
You didn't mention whether you were aware of an existing technology, but there's something known as an "induction loop".
:D
Being hearing-impaired myself, I obtained an induction loop that jacks into the cell phone. The signal is clear as day. Of course, you have to deal with batteries, but an advantage is, hands-free mode. There's a microphone portion where the cord forks into a 'Y'.
I imagine the local Bell cell-phone store would carry it (that's where I got mine).
Good luck.
spam, spam, spam, spam, e-mail, news and spam.
Can U use a ferrite rf choke to filter the RF??
a ferrite torus that you put the cable through twice wrapping the wire round the choke. I used this to eliminate the phone using my hands free headphone as an ariel to broadcast the microwaves into my skull (as the headphone is in the ear).
Hands free kits reassured many that they were less harmful to use as the phone was further away from the head thus avoiding cooking your brain (radiation falls off with square of distance). However WHICH magazine in the UK repoted that some (not all )hands free kits were acting as arials bring the microwaves closer to the brain via the ear piece, i.e. making them worse for you than the original phone next to your ear. Using a regular radio tuned for maximum interference as a microwave detector I found a ferrite choke ( 1.50 from Maplins etc ) eliminated any broadcast down the wire thus saving me from micro waves brain cookage.
So a ferrite choke could be used to stop the RF interfernce down the wire to the hearing aid. Thus allowing a cheaper wired solution (and no bluejack risk). N.B. ferrite chokes are seen on many computer cables to stop RF broadcast from them.
Is this a solution or am I a bozo? You decide.
Can a small ring of metal cut radiation from hands-free kits[www.mindfully.org] here is a link to microwave propagation along hands free kits (originally from news scientists) - mod the parent up -- informative.
It was a hot summer night, her and I were parked up in the mountains where we could see the town and beautiful lake below. After a wonderful night out on the town, what more could I expect? It was our fourth date, and she had already hinted towards a number of sexual innuendos. As I sit there letting my mind wander, I can feel her breath upon my ear getting warmer and warmer, but she is not going any further.
After 5 minutes of feeling her breath on my eat and anticipating the expected tongue, I realize that she is trying to say something to me. Perhaps she is trying to arouse me with sweet talk, or informing me to take my clothes off.
I decide to turn my hearing aid up to find out that she thinks I'm a fucking prick and she wants to go home because I don't listen to her.
Make America grate again!
USING a hands-free earpiece with a mobile phone may channel more microwave radiation into your head than holding the phone up to your ear, according to tests announced last week by Britain's Consumers' Association. But the tests also found there might be a cheap and simple solution.
The CA's tests found, however, that fitting a small ring of an iron-based compound called ferrite to the headset wire eradicated the extra radiation. "The ferrite choke acts as a high impedance to the wave and reflects it back down the cable," says Les Barclay, a member of the government's Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones.
Some of the brighter /.'ers can check out the wireless communication specs. Some carriers are slowly switching over to the 800/850 band, but not my carrier. They're mostly at 1900MHz. Here's another article that's a bit more informative.
Yea, so: I think it's possible that your phone is on the higher frequencies while the other two aren't. I know for a fact my cell is @ 1900MHz and that i really hate it when people call before 9.
As a bonus, I discovered yesterday that the cordless phones in our house drown out my wifi cable modem. What a trip. Isn't it wonderful how they're both at 2.4GHz.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Then, in December, the government changed its mind, following a report from the Consumers' Association that said mobiles with hands-free kits beamed 3.5 times more radiation into a user's head than mobiles on their own. ...
Simon Best, editor of Electromagnetic Hazard and Therapy, a specialist news service, agrees. "A choke would considerably help stop radiation from going into the head. It is not rocket science. A ferrite choke is a terribly simple little thing."
[www.rfsafe.com]
N.B. The official position of the Federation of the Electronics Industry on ferrite chokes is that they "work at some frequencies but not at others".
Can someone clarify one thing for me - why bother with Bluetooth for this application? I'd think it'd be easier just to use a cell phone that has a standard 2.5mm jack.
Take any "hands-free" kit with a microphone in the cable and a 2.5mm connector. Snip off the earpiece, leaving the microphone behind, and replace the earpiece leads with a 3.5mm mono jack. Use the 3.5mm to hearing aid adapter as shown in this story, and you're done.
If you're going to have something clipped to your belt and a big cable, may as well carry the cell phone on your belt and have the wire going directly to the phone instead of a wire to a wireless link.
It's a very rude awakening when i get an early phone call
What I really wish they'd put on cell phones is an off switch. Oh, wait...
HHHhhhhmmmmmmm??? ...Mr. Poopy-pants?
George W. Bush: A flaming Tutti-Frutti?
the definitive answer is here
Just wanted to let you know I hate you because I can't quit playing this stupid quiz game thing in your sig.
...pardon the pun
Find the patents he says he can't talk about:
>Naturally, the patentable ideas I wrote up for
>Ericsson are not disclosed, as they remain Ericsson
>property.
I'm not affiliated with them, but use their hearing aids. They are pricey ($2200/ear) but I have no problem with cell phones. The $$$ pays for a tunable dsp that has four programs. I found that I never use the telecoil.
That's just the BT headset heating up and communicating the heat to your ear. It isn't some unexplainable heating action from the BT.
Electronic devices convert nearly 100% of the energy in the battery into heat. That's all you're feeling.
I require aides myself and have been utterly frustrated with the noise that comes out of cell phones... for those who are wondering what it's like...
"Normal" phones can be listened to via a "T" mode on most hearing aides... it's usually in reference to "Telephone" or "Teleconductor". Phones with actual speakers/coil membranes in the headset can be picked up by hearing aides. Headphones can, too. We switch the mode to "T" from "M"icrophone and hear only what is being sent through the coils. Very handy and allows us to hear only what we want to hear. (Caveat: While music is much more clear in "T" mode, it's pretty much just the upper midrange to high end frequencies that we hear. No bass. Period. Ugh.)
As the article mentions... "T" mode also picks up other kinds of interference. The most common is electrical. Just a low buzzing sound. For poorly shielded equipment or poorly grounded houses... switching to "T" mode can make this noise about as loud as anything else you try to pick up through coil/conductor. Going past a power sub station is deafening (literally!) to anyone with an aide in pickup mode. Subways are extremely noisy too, since they run on electrical power (with that live third rail, too)... Better (worse?) yet, an aide in pickup mode can also pick up engine noises from cars. The revs, the click-click-click of the signals... engines change pitch depending on how fast you go. I used to freak out my friends by being able to tell them when the signals are flashing without even looking at the lights.
Cellphones use a different kind of speaker for the earpiece (usually) and they are NOT hearing aide compatible. I switch mine to "T" mode and try to listen to a cellphone? I hear NOTHING that comes out of the speaker. I pick up plenty of the interference from the cellphone, however... Whether it's in T or M mode.
On most phones I've used, probably because of the way my personal aide model picks up the interference... It sounds like a humming whine that whirrs and pulses and varies in intensity a lot. Think of it this way, I can hear the packets being sent and the intensity of the signal. It's maddening to try to hear over this noise when I simply use my aide's microphone to listen to the cellphone.
Fortunately, Samsung makes their phones well enough to where the interference doesn't carry through a hands-free wire. I've owned two Samsung phones through T-Mobile (R225 and the E105, both excellent, though the R225 has issues with a propriety hands-free connector that often shorts out) and as long as I keep the phone at least one feet away from my ear... I can listen to the convo just fine. The biggest drawback to this method that I've noticed is that the majority of the cellphones I've tried out DO NOT echo local/microphone noise back through the earpiece. It's understandable because the person shouldn't need to hear themselves speak through the phone... but in my case, I cannot hear myself speak at all! Anyone can imagine how frustrating it is when you're trying to talk and can't hear how loud you are or whether or not you are speaking clearly enough. Imagine playing in a band at a concert without any monitor speakers. If you can't hear yourself, you don't feel quite as confident with how you sound.
Fortunately, the Samsung E105 has a *slight* local echo through the earpiece... so most of the time I can just barely hear my own voice over the hands free. Most do not have any local echo (cancellation?) at all.
This guy made a pretty neat hack to use his phone for his hearing situation... if you notice, he has his phone adaptor set up in stereo (mono source, two clips for each ear). Most people just listen to phones with one ear, so I suspect this is mainly why he went the bluetooth route. Pretty smart idea, if you ask me. I only use an aide in one ear, so a hands-free piece is enough for me.
FYI: They sell inductor coil loops (one is just a loop that hangs around your neck like a necklace, another is called a Silouette... it looks like a 1/16th of an inch th
Hearing aids have become an exercise in digression. The newer hearing aids are getting smaller and smaller, becoming less and less obtrusive. Combine this with the fact that cell phone companies are striving to reduce the size of their phones (limited only by our fat fingers) and facilitate communications between bluetooth enabled devices. How long will it be until we see bluetooth wireless headsets shaped like hearing aids? (Practically) invisible wireless headsets that connect our ears to our phones.
Bluetooth has certainly made my life easier (my phone connects to my headset connects to my pda which syncs wirelessly to my PC which uses a wireless keyboard n' mouse) and if a hearing aid shaped bluetooth headset comes out then by all means sign me up... After all, as far as I'm concerned it's just a few short years before we begin implanting ourselves with wireless communications "wetware."
Toodles...
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
you want the public to make life easy for you? Sheesh, talk about nieve, Welcome to The Nation of Me.
...do I have to do it in ALL CAPS?
I've been wondering lately if one could have a hearing aid that uses bluetooth to allow the battery, DSP, etc all to be in a device separate from the what one wears in the ear (or on the ear in the case of the more powerful behind the ear aids).
There's a few reason this would be useful. A key reason is that the unit in the ear could be made cheaply enough that it is virtually disposable. This is important when you realise that the device is exposed to sweat, rain, etc - all very bad things when your aid is worth $3000+ (that's what they cost - sometimes more!). The other reason is that larger batteries and more complex signal processing would be possible in the external unit - and as a bonus, it would be easier to connect external devices such as cell phones, two-way radios, iPods, etc.
Then again, maybe the latency introduced by the bluetooth link would be too great?
Of course, my REAL dream is a PDA-sized real-time speech-to-text device, but that is a long, long, loooong way off yet.
Mandrake? More like GAYdrake! But seriously... linux is NOT the way of the future.
you just build in some terabytes ram (Hey, dont look funny, it will happen soon enough!), an mp3 player, hook up the thing directly to my hearing nerves.
Voila! Instant audio memory and playback!
I am actually loosing my vibrating inner ear hairs, that translate soundwaves into nerve signals, as I dont have an eardrum on one side. When they are all gone ill be effectively deaf with that ear.
When I get there, I want above mentioned gadget, and STILL be able to visit concerts..
I wonder what that will mean to audio copyrights... imagine one of those implanted into your retina, for visuals..
"/Dread"
What you say?
For the hearing who wonder what exactly we are talking about, telecoil is a magnetic link with the speaker of the item you are listening to. The microphone is shut off. Most cell phones crank out a lot of magnetic noise. I have this problem with my $2,000 (each!) digital Interra AV MM's and my Nokia phone. I simply use the included headset that comes with the phone and loop the small speaker behind my ear close to the hearing aid, then switch to telecoil. The sound I get is so good, I prefer to use my cell phone over any other phone.
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
My mother in law has a hearing problem too. I've been thinking about buying her a Nokia GSM phone and the induction loop device that'll talk to the T option of her hearing aid.
Does anyone have experience with that? Her hearing disability is very high.
Thanks.
But this is really cool.
Ed Chauvin IV
You know, the thought had never even crossed my mind... thank you for that, it made me laugh!
As mboverload says, I wrote the disclaimer in capitals because everyone seems to do it that way. I'm not sure why, although I suspect it might be so that people can't claim that a disclaimer was "hidden in the surrounding text" or somesuch. If someone could claim that the disclaimer was hidden so they wouldn't notice it, they might just be able to sidestep it on the basis that it hadn't been made clear, and demand damages anyway.
The reason my page doesn't have a clickable contents list with in-page link targets is so that people are forced to start at the top where the disclaimer will be presented to them up front. Mind you, I can't help feeling that it's a shame we live in a day and age where this kind of legal paranoia is necessary...
I use a simple phone adaptor which has a neck microphone and a small inductive loop. Sound quality is excellent (there is a very small rattle in my car which has the VW Pump Duese engine, but it is hardly noticeable when someone is speaking) and I have had no interference problems. What is more, the battery life is about 3 months, the additional drain on the phone battery is unnoticeable, and I can use the same loop with both hearing aids (I have a Widex for sports and outdoors and a larger Siemens with better sound quality for home and office.)
Unlike with Bluetooth, there is no additional weight on the ear. Both my colleagues who use bluetooth headsets complain of short battery life and of the weight on the ear. The only downside is the people who look at you as if you are mad as you make a phone call with no visible phone equipment at all.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
greenteeth
Quite a few Hearing Aids now offer an FM link capability.
Mine (Phonak) have an FM Microphone/Transmitter to communicate with the receivers in the aids.
After reading this discussion, I will look for a way to cable the Wireless Phone to the "HandiMic transmitter.
Anyone worked this up, yet?
There's a company in Canada that has this technology and is bringing it to market imminently.
The URL for HearPhone Technology/the Zen headset is at:
http://www.gennum.com/zen/index.html