HLAA – Montgomery County Chapter

HLAA MontCo will meet on Monday, November 18.  This is not our usual first Monday, because the Jeanes Library is a polling place, and will be preparing for the November 5 election.

There will be a general discussion of hearing challenges, a recap of the Walk 4 Hearing, a presentation of a budget, and plans for a holiday party.

The loop system will be used, and there may also be an opportunity to try out new live captioning software.

As always, visitors are welcome.  Please join us.

At the Jeanes Library, November 18, at 5:30

Because of mechanical problems at the Jeanes Library, this meeting is cancelled.

Further details here when available.   10/5/19

On October  7, Kay Tyberg, president of the Blair County chapter will speak about hearing in noisy circumstances, probably the most common aggravation that people with hearing loss deal with.  She’ll cover devices and techniques that can help.

The loop system will be used, and there will be CART (real time captioning)  for this meeting.

As always, visitors are welcome.  Please join us.

At the Jeanes Library, October 7, at 5:30

Chapter officers discussed plans for the year, touching on:

Chapter finances.
Meeting topics.
The Walk4Hearing October 20
Future leadership.

Sharon Carroll, Engagement Manager for Cochlear America spoke about current and future implants and accessories, including:

Cochlear America Presentation

Smartphone  streaming, currently limited to iPhone, but will be extended to Android.
MRI compatibility
“Bring Back the Beat”, a iPhone app designed to enhance music appreciation for CI users.  There was a lengthy discussion of musical experience.

On October  7, Kay Tyberg, president of the Blair County chapter will speak about hearing in noisy circumstances, probably the most common aggravation that people with hearing loss deal with.  She’ll cover devices and techniques that can help.

At the Jeanes Library, October 7, at 5:30

At our June 3 meeting we discussed the creation of a Mission Statement.  Members offered a wide variety of ideas and concepts that will be distilled into a formal statement, to be approved at a later meeting.

The chapter approved a contribution  (“scholarship”) of $1,500 to the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit, to be used for the purchase of ‘loaner’ hearing aids for their students.

On July 14, the MontCo chapter will again host a picnic at Fort Washington State Park for HLAA families and friends in the area.

Further details here closer to the date.

At our May 6 meeting, MontCo member Jim Saunders spoke about  hair cell regeneration in the cochlea. . Dr. Saunders has spent years researching the topic and always creates stimulating presentations.

He reviewed the essential processes of hearing, and the history of attempts to reverse hearing loss.

Dr. Saunders’ summary:

In the late 1980’s it was reported that the inner ear of the chick was capable of regenerating new hair cells, replacing those lost to various forms of ototrauma. Subsequent research showed that the new hair cells restored hearing to near normal capacity.  Hair cell regeneration does not occur in the cochlea of mammals, and the question of whether or not this process could be induced in the mammalian inner ear has been

A CART transcript of the the meeting is available on request to hlaamcc(at)gmail.com

Our June 3 meeting will be a discussion of chapter functions, especially the propose scholarship support for the MCIU.

Please join us for this important discussion.

In spite of Winter Storm Scott, several dozen members and visitors heard MontCo member Chris Doig discuss smartphone and tablet apps of interest to the hearing loss community..  She is a graduate of the N-CHATT program run by the HLAA national office, and will explain the nature of that program.

After a general presentation, members worked in small groups to explore examples of these software offerings, with varying degrees of success.

Please find Chris Doig’s listing of useful smartphone and tablet apps here:   UsingApps-1

Tech Notes:
I dug out some details about Tunity, after some mystery about how it works:
Tunity depends on an internet connection, either WiFi or cellular data.  In effect, it’s like using your phone to call the TV station and receiving the audio that way..  The question is “Who you gonna call?”, and that’s where the phone’s camera has to identify the station by pattern recognition.  That is the “scan” step, which some have found troublesome. Apparently a TV that is always tuned to a certain channel can be provided with a scannable QR or bar code to identify it.  The ultimate would be to have the audio piped into speech-to-text app, but will have to wait.
I got Tunity to work without much difficulty, but couldn’t get the sound to sync anywhere close to correct.
A note about terminology:
The word “app” is short for “application”, which in computerese means software that does something useful on your computer, like writing letters, displaying pictures, browsing the internet etc. For the most part, the term “app” has come to mean an “application”  that runs on a tablet or smartphone, generally by themselves, without going through a browser, e.g.  Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, etc.  Some applications have app versions, and some do not.  The discussion included captionfish.com and aldlocator.com, which don’t have app versions, as far as I know, but can be run on a smartphone or tablet, through a browser.  The “app” makes it simpler.

–Don Groff

20190304

Cheryl Deitz, Outreach Coordinator for Pennsylvania Captioned Telephone Relay Services (Hamilton Relay) discussed the many services provided by Pennsylvania Relay, many of which go well beyond the familiar captioned telephone service used by many of the group

Cheryl Deitz at MontCo HLAA

There 22 in attendance, inducing a number of first-time visitors.

Hamilton Relay provides traditional relay services for Pennsylvania including

• TTY,
• Voice Carry Over (VCO)
• Hearing Carry Over (HCO)
• Speech-to-Speech (STS)
• Spanish-to-Spanish
• CapTel®.

You can find more details about these services at PARelay.net

Cheryl suggested a YouTube video that illustrates the Speech to Speech function.

For our March 4 meeting, MontCo member Chris Doig will speak about new developments in remote microphone technology.

Please join us. As always, visitors are welcome.

At the Jeanes Library, 4051 Joshua Road, Lafayette Hill, PA 19444, 5:30 p.m., March 4, 2019

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