: Donna Penman, phone: 610-279-0905; Email address: pen447@verizon.net Vice-President: Patty Cortez; email:
www.hla-pa.org, or by contacting Russ Green, Scholarship Committee Chairperson, at scholarship@hla-pa.org
From there Elizabeth moved to the Association for Conflict Resolution in Washington, D.C., where she served for over a year as director of membership and development. Since then she has worked for the American Occupational Therapy Association and the American Gastroenterological Association in both membership and educational fields.
Elizabeth experienced hearing loss herself as a toddler when doctors discovered impacted wax in her ear canals. Surgery left her left eardrum loose and her hearing continued to decline when, in her mid-forties, she sought help from her primary care physician who referred her to an audiologist. The audiologist, an HLAA professional member located near HLAA’s offices who never mentioned the association or its chapters as resources to help her adapt, fitted her for a pair of open-fit hearings which she still wears today.
Please join us for our next meeting which will be held on
April 4, 2011
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
or contact Alice Dungan, who is in charge of registration for the event.
are sleek, discreet, fashionable, high-tech and low-maintenance. They can be tuned by a hearing professional, like an audiologist or hearing aid dispenser, to suit your specific hearing needs. They can connect to multiple devices such televisions and telephones. They adjust automatically for changes in volume levels and adapt to background noise.
So, if you’re looking for the latest and the greatest in hearing loss solutions, visit your local hearing center. Forget everything Grandpa told you about his hearing aids. Those days and those hearing aids are long gone, thankfully.
Today, you can enjoy the sounds of life without a lot of hassles. Modern digital hearing aids deliver sound quality and ease-of-use in small, attractive devices.
Of course, these were state-of-the art “hearing aids” for centuries until electricity became available.
These were the first electric hearing aids. Carbon was used to amplify electric current to boost the volume of sound. However, they were bulky, buzzy and downright ugly, though for those with hearing loss, they were the only choice.
Vacuum tubes were used to control the flow of electricity and, as such, they did make hearing aids a little better. However, these boxy devices were usually table-top models about the size of a clock radio, so the user had to carry around a heavy box and plug in to hear what was going on. There weren’t many controls or features, so these devices amplified all sound. That must have caused more than a few headaches back then. But hearing aids continued to improve.
Transistors enabled hearing aids to fit into a smaller shell. The first transistor hearing aids appeared in 1952 – actually, two years prior to the first transistor radios which came along in 1954. Transistor hearing aids were still big and bulky with the electronics in a box carried on the body, with ear phones connected to a tangle of wires. Not very convenient, to say the least.
Researchers shrunk transistor hearing aids over the years, making them small enough to fit behind the ear and even in the ear. However, they were anything but low-profile. They also didn’t come packed with features the way today’s hearing aids do.
Today, quality hearing aids use digital technology – circuitry that’s used in computers and cell phones - and what a difference a few decades and countless hours of research and development have made!
Pre-electric (Acoustic) Hearing Aids
or by snail mail at 106 Mountainview Drive, Chesterbrook, PA 19087.
, and Don Groff
: Kathy Harral Assistive Technology: Don Groff
: Diana Bender, email:
HLAA - Montgomery County Chapter 