aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, April 14, 2006

Hearing glasses

Still no improvement from the hearing loss. I’m adjusting well. (Not so cranky anymore.) My mother says see a chiropractor. Some friends say see an acupuncturist. Me, I still want to find a researcher.

Vertigo continues. And aural cues to spatial orientation are gone; I’m always confused about where sounds are coming from. That and noisy rooms are probably the most disconcerting things I deal with now.

Maybe I should get me a pair of these hearing glasses:

Varibel says its glasses can detect which direction sounds come from, amplifying words spoken directly to the wearer while dampening background noise.

The company’s hearing glasses have four interconnected microphones embedded along both arms of the frame, each taking in sound. Signals are sent along the frame to a built-in processor, which localizes sounds by calculating the time it takes the signals to reach the different microphones. All sounds coming from the front of the carrier are intensified, while noise from other directions is dampened. This means that a person speaking to the carrier’s face would be clearly heard even in noisy environments.