I love a good challenge, and I meet quite a few on a weekly basis. One challenge in particular is cell phone use with one of my patients. She has a terrible time on the cell phone and she does not have a bluetooth compatible phone.I use a device that is a silhouette that hangs on the back of the ear and you have to put your hearing instrument in tele-coil mode to use the phone. You have to have a tele-coil in your hearing aid in order to use this device, not all hearing aids have tele-coils installed on them. Talk with your hearing health care professional to see if your hearing aid has a tele-coil.

I saw my patient several weeks ago and she keeps complaining about the phone use, so I introduced this device I had to see if she wanted to give it a try. I hooked it up and went outside to call her and she said she could hear every word and it was crystal clear. I thought cool, this was her biggest challenge, but then she mentions that her land line phone was hard to hear on also. Well, we hooked it up to the cordless home phone and she could hear real well on it also.

As a joke she told me she uses the old Sony Walkman to listen to tapes(remember those) when she goes for a walk at night. So I thought it has a headphone jack on that I wonder if that would work. So we plugged it in and she turned on her tele-coil and bingo ole' blue eyes was coming in loud and clear.

Ok, so the real challenge was that this device is supposed to be used with Behind the Ear hearing instruments only. Well this young lady had half-shell hearing instruments(smaller in the ear instruments) which in theory are not supposed to work with this type. I was truly amazed that I could link everything up to this device with no problems what so ever. I saw her the other day and she just rants and raves about how she can walk around and clean her house while talking on the phone and having both hands free. I believe everyone should think outside the box, and just because someone says "that won't work" doesn't mean they are always right.