Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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?
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. :)
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 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.
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.
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.
well, that would imply that he had some marketable skill besides being his father's son, so i'd say it's unlikely.
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!
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.
...pardon the pun
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.
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.
+5 Insightful
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"
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.
The root cause is definitely the RF transmission, or a system directly related to it, although I don't have the entire lab's worth of resources I'd need to determine the exact mechanism.
There's no interference if the phone is quietly switched on and not sending to the network, even if you're playing games or something on it. It only appears during radio transmission, either during a voice call or during the few seconds it takes for an SMS to transfer. I generally know an SMS is coming in before the phone does - the sound is quite distinctive.
The web page I wrote was intended for an intelligent layperson, so I deliberately omitted abstruse discussions of the various RFI-related mechanisms that might be at work.
You're probably right about the GHz frequencies as such, but the bursty nature of the transmission is another thing entirely. I suspect that it embodies the audible frequencies I hear as interference in what one might call unintended modulation.
A hi-fi enthusiast once told me that he can hear SMS arriving on the hi-fi downstairs with the phone upstairs, almost certainly for the same reason. This Motorola link has sound samples, for anyone who wants to know what these things sound like.