The following is an excerp from an article I wrote for one of the manufacturers about why we (hearing instrument dispensers) should recommend and sell FM systems along with our hearing aids.  This is provided to give you insight into what I am thinking of and why my thinking is the way it is when I make recommendations for people with more active lifestyles.

My wife and I were out shopping the other day and stopped to get a bite to eat at a nice restaurant.

There was music playing in the background and the restaurant was very busy as it was the lunch hour.

While we were sitting at our table talking I noticed an older couple being seated at the table across from

us. They must have been in their mid-seventies and I also noticed that he was wearing binaural digital ITE

hearing aids with directional microphones. Halfway through our meal my wife made the comment that it

seemed so sad that the older couple were just starring off into space while they were eating and never

saying a word to each other. I started to observe them through the balance of our meal and came to the

same conclusion that my wife had. They never spoke to each other. They would look at each other at

times but then just start looking at the ceiling. This brought back memories of a patient I had worked

with and his spouse who, when I was explaining the advantages of using a Personal Communication

System (PCS) and how it could be used in a restaurant she had broken down in tears. When I asked her

what the reason for crying was she said “I’m so tired of going out to eat and eating alone.” I realized that

was what we had just witnessed, two people going out to eat together, but eating alone, and it left me

feeling sad. I was also sad, and just a little angry, because someone who had taken on the responsibility

of helping that person improve both his listening ability and his quality of life had only done half their

job. One of the things I would like to help accomplish is to never have to see couples going out to eat

together and ending up alone when we have the technology to allow them to enjoy each other’s

company while dining out.

Today’s modern hearing aids are both sophisticated and extremely adjustable. The hearing aid can be fit

to compensate for a person’s hearing loss plus meet their personal needs for sound quality to what they

hear, which is a very personal perception. Good hearing aids coupled with good fitting should allow our

patients, with moderate to moderately severe hearing losses, to listen to speech in a quiet environment

at between twelve to fifteen feet from the source. This distance will shrink as the patient’s loss increases

and/or their word recognition decreases. In a moderately noisy environment, with the patient wearing

good hearing aids equipped with digital directional microphones that are fit correctly, we can reasonably

expect our patient to hear at a range of five to six feet. This is because we make the assumption that the

sound source our patient wants to hear is within six feet and everything beyond six feet is sound clutter

in the environment. Also physics and the inverse square law start to come into play generally beginning

at about six feet in a mildly sound cluttered environment. The effect of this law is to reduce the sound

recognition. It also must be kept in mind that ambient noise environments that our patients believe to be

quiet are in reality mild to moderately noisy environments. This means that most home environments

are not quiet even if the hearing aids are acting like it is. These environmental noise levels reduce both

the range at which our patient can listen to conversation and the clarity of speech.

How many times have we heard our patients or their spouses complain about not hearing or being heard

in the home and the distances involved are between six to twenty-four feet. How many times have we

heard our patients could not hear their friends or family members when they came over to the house

and the distance between our patient’s chair and the couch was ten to fifteen feet and the distance at

the dinner table was five to ten feet. Plus, we have the complaint “my wife expect me to hear her when

I’m watching the news (it’s always the news, never sports) and she is talking to me from the bedroom or

the kitchen (generally working at the sink with water running). And they always ask us “why don’t these

new, fancy, and extremely expensive digital hearing aids improve my ability to hear my spouse better

then my old aids?” The answer we need to give them involves a physics lesson in sound propagation

followed with the problem’s solution. Or maybe the correct answer should be a physics lesson with a

complete solution before we sell them that NEW, FANCY, and EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE DIGITAL HEARING

AID. Maybe we need to incorporate both that expensive new hearing aid plus an integrated package of

on-board and/or out-board devices designed to overcome or bypass the inverse square law and/or the

acoustical physics of sound propagation that’s the problem.