hardofhearingchildren.com by PAM Candlish MLS
"What did you say?" "Eh?" "WHAT did you say?" "MM?" "WHAT DID YOU SAY?" oh "PARDON ME!"

FM's Are Wonderful !

Sound is controlled by earshot which is the dropping of loudness in relation to distance. Hearing aids pick up sound where they are, and function within concentric circles of loss of effectiveness. The hearing aid companies have not yet made a hearing aid which can compete with the human ear.

The child with a mild or moderate hearing loss spends much of their lives listening to an amplified world of mis-signals. Part of the major problem of having a mild or moderate hearing loss is the issue of partial hearing, of striving to hear, to unlock the puzzle of information coming in from the world and sort out the important from the unimportant. When hearing is moderately reduced, the environmental sounds are enough to drive people around the bend because of all the extra effort to listen to a sound, and determine whether it is important. Lots of kids give up after lunch, my own included. We scheduled academics in the morning only.

A deaf child has much less of this cacaphony in his/her world. Deaf children doing auditory training must listen to partial small sounds, and extrapolate to the big sound. They learn from partial sounds, and when all goes well, they can do a miraculous leap from what they hear to what is going on. The deafer the child, the less background noise can be heard.

When the hearing aid industry was focused on providing large gain for very deaf people, the implications of background noise were not present in the hearing aid market to begin with. To get a deaf child to hear anything was a miracle in itself, and to get a deaf child to talk based on what came through the hearing aid was another miracle. Probably we will find out later that we built additional neural pathways to enhance this process. We know practically nothing about deafness, and even less about remediating deafness.

The cochlear implant has in a very short period of time removed the market of powerful hearing  aids for the very deaf. At the same time, electronic technology is growing by leaps and bounds, smaller and more effective every year. Plus we have an anticipated market for many people who used headsets for music at too loud a level for too long who are slowly going deaf now. Also the lack of control over the constant urban noise, cars, trucks, motorcycles, sirens, jack hammers, mall music blaring will result in more diagnosis of unexplained hearing loss. Until we treat our ears with the respect they deserve, we will be increasing the numbers of hard of hearing or deaf people. This is great news to the hearing aid companies who have produced excellent quality hearing aids for big bucks.

The Progress of FM Technology

Fifty years ago, my dad put a automatic garage opener on the house. When he was driving down the street he would push a button, and all the garage doors on the street with automatic openers opened. This did nothing for security, and the units were soon improved with individual channels. At the same time, the crystal FM's were being used in schools for teachers to get sound across to the deaf student(s) in the class. The teachers had a set of crystals, and changed the crystal to change the student.     

 Ten years ago, I bought a toy FM radio which was on a hair clip. The radio had an off/on switch, battery power, a dial, and used the wire to the ear plug as an antenna  The unit was 1 by 2 inches by 1/4 inch and cost about a dollar. This is quite a contrast to the current cost of the FM's being used with hearing aids, in a dedicated range of frequencies to prevent cross-transmission.

Once my son and I were at the Houses of Parliament in Ottawa just as the CBC was sending up the news broadcast from a truck. Reid was wearing his Micro-link, and stopped to listen. Shortly after in the car, we listened to the broadcast on the radio, and he said "That's exactly what I heard in my hearing aid." I guessed that we were so close to the the source of the broadcast that it overrode everything. This is a problem which the hearing aid companies had hoped to solve by using a dedicated set of FM frequencies.

From a teacher's point of view, FM's are something you have on, forget about, and then embarrass yourself by going and talking to another teacher. Sooner or later, you might get the idea that the hard of hearing child in the class seems to have a special relationship with you. Well, that is true, but it is the only advantage to being hard of hearing. Most of the time, the hard of hearing child is working so hard to listen, and cope at school, that the moments of teacher embarrassment are a minor reward.

And you never should forget that you have a hard of hearing child in the class who exists because of the technology, and who can be there with apparent full auditory input and be hearing little because you are not repeating the necessary information.

My son never hears the intercom, never hears announcements, hears class bells as very loud and hears nothing when fire alarms go off. He probably never hears homework assignments, but most of the teachers write homework on the blackboard. The use of an overhead projector instead of the blackboard is written in his IEP. After all these years of not hearing, he has developed a comfortable world which he can cope, and a buddy to tell him if the announcement is for him to go to the office.

The Classroom is usually a den of acoustic iniquity.

Classrooms are very noisy places. Some of this ambient classroom noise can be reduced with tennis balls on the chair and table feet. A  12 ft. carpet under the hard of hearing student's desk also helps to reduce this noise. The carpet is generally provided by the school, and is sometimes called "A Flying Carpet" because it moves up the school with the student.  Reid's grade one teacher made an extraordinary effort to improve the acoustics in her class, even providing sound baffles for the ceiling, and using the drapes as sound buffers.

What can a FM do?

 A FM brings the sound of the person wearing the microphone right to the hard of hearing child's hearing aid. It bypasses earshot and the loud noises in the classroom of papers, books, chairs, tables, and other kids and provides better information from the speaker.

The microphone or mike.

There are several models of microphones for FM's. The ones which the teachers like the best have a lariat which hangs around the neck because they are comfortable and discreet. When I am listening to a speaker using a lariat mike,  I cannot hear anything when the speaker turns their head because the signal drops drastically. I think the lariat mikes should be taken off the market because they do not work well enough.

Once I was listening to Carol Flexer speak at a parent's conference, She was provided with a lariat mike and half of what she said was unintelligible to me, whenever she turned her head. I also had no idea what the questions were for a discussion after. Several years later, people with questions had to use a microphone so the questions were broadcast to the whole room. The group was providing a written text from speech on a screen behind the speaker, which was reasonably accurate most of the time, and occasionally ridiculous.  In this environment which was mostly parents of deaf children planning to get cochlear implants, the acoustics should certainly be examined so that a hard of hearing parent can hear the speakers because we were in a room which temporarily contained a million dollars worth of personal sound equipment. The room like many public meeting rooms does not ordinarily provide adequate sound, although there is a public address system. And it is even worse in a court where the lack of awareness of hearing disabilities provides no compensation for people who cannot hear pins drop. Scott Simser, a Canadian lawyer is working on that.

FM's are needed at home too.

When Reid was little, I heard about FM's and suggested I would like one at home, as mom who did all the speaking, and spent my life about two feet from my child's ear, maintaining good auditory input. It was suggested that a FM on mom would interfere in that close relationship between parent and child. FM's were for school, not for parents.

My book, Not Deaf Enough included my needs for a FM at home which was radical suggestion, and many kids now have FM's at home because of my continued promotion of the FM. It is really very simple, if you need a hearing aid, you also need a FM. It is my personal experience that you need adaptive technology like the FM before you need hearing aids as you progress from normal hearing through mildly hard of hearing. We had a child in our school who was older than my son who only put his hearing aids on for story time, which just does not construe logically. If the child needed hearing aids, he needed them all the time at home and at school, and if the child needed hearing aids for story time, he really needed a FM because the hearing aids would not work at a distance.

Assess the environment for the non-hearing situations and learn to use the adaptive technology properly in order to be heard better by the hard of hearing child. 

As the child gets more savvy with equipment, the child can decide which is going to work best for the situation. For example Reid has a choice of table mike or head-mounted mike on the teacher, and he is certainly old enough to decide which piece of equipment is best for this point in time.

 However, he can never assess what he does not hear, no-one can, a point Carol Flexer makes over and over.

At school the speaker must wear the mike, at home the speaker must wear the mike. Anytime, except swimming, and in bed, a FM can overcome distance and the implications of earshot.

The single most important reason for us to have a FM at home right now is for learning to drive. Reid's deaf ear is on the right, and his hard of hearing ear is on the left, so when he is driving he will have some information from the driver's side ear. As he is learning to drive, he cannot hear the passenger-teacher say "You are driving too fast." So the FM makes learning to drive easier. and it would have been nice when he was little and refusing to wear his seat belt, because he never heard me in the car.

Using the FM properly.

You have to make sure that you are repeating the right information in the right order. 
If you have a favorite thing to say which is a mild platitude for a correct answer, then the child on the FM is hearing your platitude a lot. Probably it is good to hear platitudes, especially when a child is hard of hearing, but the child still has to process set, meaning the child is in math mode, expecting to hear math answers, and then transfer to another track, so to speak for the platitude which after all had nothing to do with the question, and then go back to math set.  Reverse the order to repeating the expected answer directly after the question, and then using the general platitude.

Repetition has gone out of vogue in teaching, but watch Tele Tubbies from beginning to end and see how important repetition is, not to forget Sesame Street which I saw daily for 14 years as a mother. There is nothing magical about getting to school and getting bored with repetition, and certainly as a pianist for 45 years, and recorder teacher for 10 years, I can say repetition is integral to playing a musical instrument. In teaching the times tables to those of  my children who did not easily learn them at school, I used stop signs and red lights to quiz the math of the day, this was all repetition of what they learned at school.

The process of learning a language is complex, and being understood as  full of variables which even a young ( age 1 - 2 years) child is getting all sorts of messages, some of which are important and some of which are not important. The child listens and processes and has more receptive language for a while, then adding in their own limited speech which expands magically. 

It has been suggested by many researchers that a hearing-impaired child must hear a new word perhaps as many as ten times more than a hearing child to learn the word. 

Few people present a scientific approach to learning language to their own child. My daughter learned to speak using black and white pictures because that was the scientifically based best way 20 years ago.  When faced with another child who needed speech therapy, I choose to use reality for the lessons, not line drawings because it had not been really effective with my daughter, and the task of teaching speech to a child who could not hear seemed enormous.

As Dr. Daniel Ling says on p.180 in Foundations of Spoken Language for Hearing-Impaired Children 1989 

"Speech that is addressed to a child after the event is less meaningful than speech that goes on as the child's attention is focused on it."

Pass Around or Table top Mike for groups

A pass around mike was ordered by the audiologist and supplied by the school board. We had a Phonak Handi-mike when Reid was 15. Phonak promoted this mike as an all around FM unit, but it was very sensitive and suffered from wire and clothing rub. However as a group mike used on a table and not touched by anyone by Reid it is superb. Reid could put the unit on a table for a group discussion and hear the voices around the table for the first time in his life, truly a miracle.

A head mounted mike turns with the speaker's head keeping an even level of input. The use of a head-mounted FM mike is written into Reid's IEP. The expensive part of the FM transmitter is the little box, the head phones only cost about $30. Our teachers do not want to wear a FM recently worn by another teacher. The solution is to buy multiple headsets and move the box from head set to headset as the child goes from class to class. The principal or narrator should also have a headset if the school has assemblies in rooms with inadequate sound.

The Ling Sound Test Ah EE Ou SH SS M and a pass word should be used every time the equipment is turned off and on, or moved.

Secondarily the hard of hearing child can be linked into a sound system at school if the equipment will allow this for plays, assemblies, and shows. We had a patch cord which gave direct audio input to many of the sound appliances in a school, which cost $5 at Radio Shack.

FM's for Sports

Theoretically the FM should also be used for sports especially if the hard of hearing child is part of a team with verbal input from a coach. Guess who should have the FM on for a football game? The coach. Of course, the FM costing too much money and not working after getting wet means the FM probably is not used during sweaty sports.

The Child's Part is a  FM receiver.

I hated the box FM. I pleaded with Telex to make the equipment smaller, and was told that the major part of their market was pop music stars who liked to have big microphones in their hands as part of the act. There are artistic effects to microphone use which singers choose to use by bringing the mike up close to the mouth or further away. Some sound specialists said a head mounted mike on a signer would have a flat sound compared to the dynamic use. A few singers are using head mounted mike because they like them.

The net effect of the major market not wanting small, is that most of the FM companies made no effort to get rid of the crystals, and reduce the size of the box. Nobody except many of the parents felt the companies could do better. Before 1984, deaf babies, if they were diagnosed at all, which was rare, had box hearing aids, and cords, and two ear molds. In 1985, Reid was the first group of deaf babies to have little behind the ear hearing aids ( in boring beige). In 1989 when Reid went to school, he was designated as the deaf kid in the class by the box FM and cords (which broke frequently). He used a box FM until 1997 when the Micro-link came on the market. We all regard the Micro-link as a miracle, especially Reid.

The Micro-link uses the power of the hearing aid battery, and the gain of the hearing aid to transmit the FM signal from the speaker to the hard of hearing person's ear. Micro-links can be put on most brands of hearing aids modifying the direct audio input into which the boots from the traditional FM linked.

If the Micro-link were not on the market, we would still be using a box FM, no matter how clumsy it is because the FM part of the hearing equipment is vital. However the box FMs are just as expensive as the Micro-link, so I would try a Micro-link first.

-PAM Candlish March 2002