Phones, hearing aids and loop aerials

[Tim Downie]

I have and aging aunt-in-law who used an old fashioned hearing aid with separate ear-piece and amplifier.

This works very well for her apart from when she uses the phone. To do so, she has to remove the amplifier from somewhere under her cardigans and hold it over the earpiece of the phone, a process that takes a little time and often results in callers hanging up before she can initiate a conversation.

Life would be simpler if her phone earpiece could be linked up to a loop aerial that covered a wider area so that she wouldn't have to fiddle with her hearing aid. Do any phones exist with the appropriate socketry to allow them to be connected to a loop-aerial amplifier? She already has a phone with a built in inductive coupler but that's not a lot of use with the old chest mounted amplifier that she uses.

TIA

Tim

[Dave Stanton]

Try the RNID, Royal National Institute for the Deaf web site or ask them.

Dave

[BigWallop]

conversation.

She can get a telephone with a separate amplified earpiece, or one which has an hearing aid adaptor that she can leave an earpiece connected to for when the phone rings. There's also the hands free phone range which might be of some use to her.

Contact the social services department or the RNID for more help.

[Gel]

If you are in UK, try

some good stuff. Gordom himself is profoundly deaf so knows his stuff.

[Tim Downie]

Thanks. They've been very helpful (once they understood the specific problem). It would seem that the use of the old chest mounted hearing aid is pretty rare nowdays.

Thinking around the problem, it would seem that it might be better to get a bone-conduction handset which would remove the necessity for any loops. If that doesn't appeal, I might get a cheaper speaker phone and look at ways to replace the speaker with a loop aerial.

Cheers.

Tim

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