Hearing News Watch

KNOXVILLE, TN–Regal Cinemas, the country’s largest chain of movie houses, has announced that by the end of May it will have distributed caption-displaying Access Glasses for patrons with hearing loss to more than 6000 of its theaters nationwide. When moviegoers use this technology, captions are projected onto the Access Glasses, but the words look as if they are floating about

WASHINGTON, DC—The Better Hearing Institute (BHI) is urging employers to include hearing health as part of their workplace wellness programs. Noting that June will be the fifth annual National Employee Wellness Month, the non-profit educational corporation points out that addressing hearing loss in the workplace is a smart business practice that benefits both employer and employee. To facilitate timely hearing

    By David H. Kirkwood WASHINGTON, DC—Consultants commissioned by the American Academy of Audiology (AAA) calculate that allowing Medicare beneficiaries direct access to care from an audiologist would reduce costs by $173.3 million over the next ten years by eliminating duplicative audiological services and unnecessary evaluation and management services. In its report, “Determining Potential Medicare Savings by Streamlining Beneficiary

  BLOOMINGTON, MN—-Are you a hearing healthcare provider who has had a memorable, magical moment when the hearing aid you fitted or the counseling you provided brought joy to your patient? If not, you may be in the wrong profession. But if during your career you have experienced one or ten or 100 such moments that brought a smile to

  PRINCETON, NJ—Blending electronics and biology, scientists at Princeton University have used readily available 3D printing tools to create a functioning “bionic ear” that can detect radio frequencies far beyond the range of normal human capability. In a May 1 news release, John Sullivan of the Office of Engineering Communication at Princeton reported that the primary purpose of the researchers

IOWA CITY, IA—The University of Iowa is making a major commitment to improving access to its facilities for people with hearing loss. As reported last week in Iowa Now, the university’s information web site, an induction loop was recently installed in an 84-seat lecture hall in a medical laboratories building in the College of Medicine. That was the first of

NEW YORK—Visitors to Times Square, which New Yorkers like to call the “Crossroads of the World,” are getting a heavy dose of better hearing messages this month. Siemens Hearing Instruments, Inc., which is headquartered across the Hudson River from New York in Piscataway, NJ, is celebrating May as Better Hearing and Speech month by airing a 30-second hearing loss awareness video

WASHINGTON, DC—The U.S. Supreme Court announced on April 22 that it would not hear an appeal of a Federal District Court verdict against the Danish hearing aid manufacturers William Demant Holding A/S and Widex A/S in a patent case brought by Energy Transportation Group. The high court’s decision leaves standing a jury’s $31 million verdict against Demant (which owns Oticon) and

By David H. Kirkwood The National Association of the Deaf, joined by more than 75 other national and state advocacy groups for people with hearing loss, wrote last week to Shaun Donovan
, secretary of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
 (HUD), urging that “quotas” not be imposed on the number of people with hearing loss who can live in

LOUISVILLE, KY—A jury here awarded $7.24 million to a family from Vine Grove, KY, after concluding that Advanced Bionics, a cochlear implant manufacturer, had knowingly sold a defective device that caused severe harm to 6-year-old Breanna Sadler. In their verdict, reached on April 17 in federal court in Louisville, the jury awarded the Sadlers $6.25 million in punitive damages and