BALTIMORE, United States-Millions of hearing-aid wearers in Europe and throughout the world could benefit from work underway in the United States on a national standard intended to eliminate interference from signals emitted by digital wireless phones.
Unlike analog phones, which cause little or no interference, digital phones can create an irritating buzz in hearing aids, rendering the phones unusable by most hearing-aid wearers unless they employ external plug-in devices that separate the phone and hearing aid via a flexible wire.
“(The devices) alleviate the problem, but they’re not really an ideal solution,” said Dr. John Gill, an official of COST 219, a cooperative effort by 19 European countries to make telecommunications “useful to all, including disabled and elderly people.”
The COST 219 group estimates more than 80 million people in Europe suffer from some degree of hearing loss. According to other studies, approximately 8 million Europeans use hearing aids. In the United States, more than 28 million people have some degree of hearing difficulty, and about 6 million are hearing-aid wearers.
Aproposed American National Standards Institute (ANSI) document addressing the digital interference problem is being developed by a committee of more than 60 engineers and scientists representing wireless equipment and hearing-aid manufacturers.
Organizations and advocates for the hearing-impaired also are involved in the work.
“We have a mature draft and are in the midst of validation testing,” said Stephen Berger, senior engineer at Siemens Wireless Terminals, who shares the chairmanship of the standards committee with Tom Victorian, director of application engineering at Starkey Laboratories Inc., a U.S.-based hearing aid manufacturer.
Berger noted the proposed standard must undergo a thorough public review and approval before ANSI publishes the document. Although that may not happen before mid-1999, Berger said there already is “a lot of voluntary compliance” among manufacturers with the provisions of the draft standard.
In the meantime, Berger will be traveling to Europe to explore the possibility of an international standard with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), an organization that prepares and publishes global standards for electrical, electronic and related technologies. “We very much want to make our effort an international solution,” Berger said.
The proposed ANSI standard covers signal strength, but also stipulates signal quality, so hearing-aid wearers using digital wireless phones receive the intended voice signal free of noise and distortion. The proposed standard also addresses the extistence of different types of phones and hearing aids.
Berger anticipates that external plug-in devices or special handsets may still be required in some instances, but only “for particular needs or in pretty specialized situations.”
The U.S. standards-setting effort was put in motion after a January 1996 Washington, D.C., conference on hearing-aid interference at which hearing-disability advocates told the wireless industry that access for the hearing impaired should be built into digital phones from the outset.
A month later, President Bill Clinton signed into law the 1996 telecom reform bill, which says telecommunications manufacturers and carriers must ensure that equipment and services are available and accessible to persons with disabilities provided that to do so is “readily achievable.” This past April the Federal Communications Commission proposed rules to promote the access called for in the telecom bill.
“We do not have any direct equivalent of the 1996 telecom act,” said COST 219’s Dr. Gill. “We tend to do things more by mandatory standards and regulation in Europe. So the fact that we haven’t got legislation doesn’t necessarily mean we haven’t got any controls. But in this particular area (of wireless phones), we’re remarkably short of them.”
All of which would seem to make the prospect of an international digital phone standard welcome news to the hearing-impaired community.
