Communication Strategy for hearing impaired: Restaurants

Tuesday Tips: Restaurants

Restaurants must be the bain of all hearing aids. Hearing aids do well with isolated noises, but with noise from all directions, it becomes quite confusing. A few strategies when dining out, however, can help minimize problems.

• Pick your restaurants carefully. Restaurants with a lot of ambience tend to be bad. Ambience in restaurants usually come in the form of low-lighting, background music, and hard, funky surfaces. The best restaurant from an acoustic standpoint is one with upholstered furniture, no background music, good lighting, and low ceilings.
• Go early for dinner. You can miss the bulk of the noisy dinner crowd and you usually have your choice of any seat in the house. So pick the potentially quietest corner or table in the restaurant.
• Choose your table wisely. If you can choose a table, pick one that’s in the corner. Two walls mean a little less noise. However, make sure you’re not right by the kitchen; otherwise, you’ll hear all the cutlery and chopping emitting from there. If there are booths available, they are often better for communication. The enclosure of your table can reduce the amount of noise that you hear.
• If you do get to choose a seat at your table, pick according to where the noise is. If you have hearing aids, you should set the aids to the noise mode and sit with your back to the restaurant while facing the wall. The wall doesn’t make as much noise as your fellow diners, so it’s better to be facing it. If you don’t have hearing aids, then sit beside the wall so that at least you can hear some of the conversation from one ear.

Sometimes, you can do all the above and still have a difficult time in the restaurant. Be patient and have a good humour about misunderstood conversation. Sometimes the misunderstanding can lead to good joke for everyone to share.

Posted via email from Ann Reflection

Tuesday Tips for communicating with hearing impaired: Reducing Background Noise

Reducing Background Noise

It doesn’t take too much to make a conversation easier to hear. Just reduce the background noise. I’m not asking you to stop the world from turning and getting all the noise out of the world, but you can do some simple things to reduce background noise.

• Turn down or off any unnecessary music or sound. That could be your own TV or the radio. You may have to ask the owner of the device to turn it down. A conversation is lot easier without music covering over all the words
• Close the windows. If the windows are open and you get all the traffic noise, shut the sound out by closing the windows. It’s a tough call during a hot summer day, but less noise makes a huge difference
• Move away from the noise. If you can’t control the sound, at least move away from it. Just stepping a few feet away, or even out of a room, from the noise, it will be a relief to your ears and your conversation partner.

There’s no one end-all answer to reducing background noise. Use your best judgment and reduce any background noise that you can reduce.

Posted via email from Ann Reflection

Communication Strategy for hearing impaired: Visualizing the Scenario

Tuesday Tips: Planning Ahead – Visualizing the Scenario

Imagine you were visiting Montreal and you know some French, enough to get by. However, you haven’t used your French in eons. You want to go to a local boulangerie to buy some fresh baguettes. If you’re like me, you would practice in your head exactly what you want to say (I want one baguette, please – en francais, of course). Then you are going to practice what they might say back to you (That will be $4.95 – again, en francais). Of course, you may want to practice something that’s totally off topic (Where did you get that dress), but that wouldn’t fit the context (or maybe it will).
Visualization is a technique that is often used by athletes in preparation for difficult maneuvers. We can use the same when approaching difficult communication situations.

• Envision the scenario that is about to happen. Important visual and aural cues are missing with hearing loss, but the brain can fill in the gaps if you know what is happening.
• Anticipate what is going to be said. In a place like boulangerie, there are certain phrases that are commonly used. Practice those phrases. The practice would help your brain to be prepared for what is about to be said.
• Different situations means different possibilities. So what you might expect in the bakery would be different from what is said in a doctor’s office from what is said in a restaurant. Context is everything.

Visualize the scenario and anticipate the speech and your brain will be warmed up for each and every difficult situation. Just like many things, planning ahead can help you to avoid unwanted pitfalls.

Posted via email from Ann Reflection

Communication Strategy for hearing impaired - Lighting

Tuesday Tips: Lighting

The amount of light in the room is not the first thing you think about when you talk about hearing. However, you can hear better if you see better. Think of the last conversation you had with somebody standing in front of a brightly-lit window. It wasn’t fun, was it? There are often shadows that can fall on people’s faces. That makes it hard to see their facial expressions and lips, which are important to the context of any conversation. Then there’s that awful glare from staring towards the window too long. I can see imprints of light in my eyes just thinking about it.

• Increase the light if it’s too dark. As romantic as conversations in the dark are, it may not be the best for your communication. Turn on the lights and you’ll often have an easier time talking to each other.
• Move away from glaring sources of light. So as with the brightly-lit window scenario, it may be best not to stand right by that window. It can be tiring for all talkers involved and harsh shadows on the face just don’t look endearing.
• Put your back to the window. If it’s not too bright, then the window can provide just the right amount of light. However, you will likely want your back to the window so that the light falls on the face of those you’re speaking to.

Posted via email from Ann Reflection

Simplified Skype Interface Demo

The goal of this project is to design and implement a simplified interface for Skype which will enable the target users, the senior with demenia, to use Skype as a video-communication tool with the family.
We will install the software in a touch screen computer, such as ASUS Eee Top 15.6-Inch Touchscreen PC, to provide a more intuitive interface, particular for the user with no computer experience.
This interface developed with QT-toolkit and its python binding. www.canassist.ca

Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO-BaokqE-c