What Are You Doing Right Now

Reid Cooper

While crazy, I do like the Crazy AJ's idea. It seems to have some legs. A long shot, to be sure. But an interesting one.

dafyre

@thanksajdotcom I'm pretty much completely deaf. (My hearing has been vanishing since I was ~12 years old. The last 4 or 5 years, the rate of vanishing has been rapidly increasing.

Hearing aids don't help because of the type of hearing loss I have (hearing aids just pump more volume in)... The short version is that everybody's ears have little hairs inside them. Sound vibrates the little hairs. Well, instead of my hairs being like pine needles and swaying in the wind, they are like 2 x 4's that simply don't bend enough to generate the sound.

The cochlear implant fixes this by attaching directly to the cochlea and pumping the sound straight to my brain (much like a microphone jack, lol).

I'll wear a device that looks a bit like a hearing aid, but it transmits through the skin in my scalp where they put the implant.

scottalanmiller

Can you get bluetooth adapters for those so that you can hook directly to a stereo, TV, computer, PS4 or whatever?

Minion Queen

I know my sister has Bluetooth with her hearing aids.

scottalanmiller

@Minion-Queen said:

I know my sister has Bluetooth with her hearing aids.

Those are physically larger, though, and are really just a complex form of headphone. An implant is a different beast.

dafyre

I think that's coming in a software updte to the Speech processors (the hearing aid bits)... Not sure when that comes though.

I am about 99% certain that the remote control is bluetooth , lol. It's one of the questions I'll be asking for tomorrow. But ideally, I won't need to hook it up to anything... My phone will hook up to my car's radio via bluetooth, so we've already got that covered. The Mic's on these things are supposed to be excellent and omnidirectional, so I shoul dbe able to just hold the phone to my ear like a normal person.

The trick is going to be teaching my brain to ignore all these sounds that you can hear and already ignore. Things like a CPU fan coming on... or the fire alarm because your mother cooked the biscuits a little too long again...

It's not going to be like turning on a hearing aid and magically I can hear again... I'll have to work at it a lot for a while. I've heard from other folks who got the same model I did and they say that everything sounds robotic and tinny at first, but they never said how long it takes for that to go away (or they just got used to it), lol.

I'm excited about it though. Lots of new challenges.

scottalanmiller

Can you turn it off when needed? A friend of a lot of us here had those and found it overwhelming and removed them

dafyre

@scottalanmiller said:

Those are physically larger, though, and are really just a complex form of headphone. An implant is a different beast.

Generally speaking, yes. The speech processor (see my previous post) is about the size of a hearing aid too... although 2/3s of it is battery, lol... They expect I should get a week off of a pair of watch sized batteries (the little ones, not the quarter sized ones)... Don't know what the model size is yet... Or if I get the rechargables, I'll get about 24 hours off of a single charge... We will see how it goes.

dafyre

@scottalanmiller said:

Can you turn it off when needed? A friend of a lot of us here had those and found it overwhelming and removed them

A lot of people do find it overwhelming -- especially if they've never heard before. But yeah, they are like hearing aids. I can turn them on and off at will (I also have a volume control so that if it hurts, i can turn it down a little)

Minion Queen

I know a few people who have had the implants done. Most everyone has kept them only a couple found them to be too much, but I do know that the adjustment period was a long headache filled process. However I have been told having a headache from hearing your child talk to you is one of the best headaches possible