Talking on the cell phone

When my husband got his first cell phone I tried to hear on it and wow I got a ton of feedback from his phone. In fact it got to the point that I would hate to sit next to him while he was on the phone because of the intense buzzing that would go on in my ears. I'm sure some of you out there have heard computer speakers going crazy when someones cell phone is getting ready to ring. Now just imagine that right in your ear, I can assure you it's not pleasant.

So if a cell phone does that just being near me then how am I supposed to use one? Well at first we tried to find some phones that were just really loud and I would take my hearing aid out and try to hear without it. This really didn't work out that well and of course since I couldn't hear that well I was then yelling in the phone assuming the person on the other end cannot hear me as well so basically everyone around me can hear in detail both ends of the call.

My husband made it his mission to find a cell phone that would be compatible with my hearing aid. The first problem we ran into was we were using T-mobile service and at that time there were not many T-mobile phones compatible to hearing aids. In fact the signalling that T-mobile used for communications was different than many other providers and that caused some of the issues I was having with the cell phones. After some further research we learned that clam-shelled style phones work better for people with hearing aids as the antenna is further away from the ear than other phones.

My husband was a Nokia fan at the time and did some research on Nokia's website to see that were aware of the issues with cell phones and hearing aids. In fact they created a loop that could plug into your phone and wear around your neck into order to create a t-coil effect so your hearing aids would work better with the phone. We actually knew of someone that used this with their Nokia phone.




We continued to do more research and found out about HAC ratings on cell phones that the FCC started to enforce. The rating scale ranges from 1 to 4. The four possibilities are: M1 or T1 (poor), M2 or T2 (fair), M3 or T3 (good) and M4 or T4 (excellent). We made it our goal to find at least a M3 or T3 phone. Again T-Mobile phones seemed to max out at that level but Verizon, Sprint and other providers had M4/T4 rated phones. We ended up getting a Samsung phone and when I used it I would leave my hearing aids in my ear and leave it in normal mode and I could hear okay but of course I had hoped for better.

I later had found out that some of my issues were due to the fact that I was using analog hearing aids and that it was time for me to move to the digital age. Moving to digital hearing aids opened up many different opportunities for me but that is something I will save for next time.