Eye Health Vision Center headquarters located at Rte. 6, Dartmouth, recently opened a new state-of-the-art “Virtual Sound Room”, the first of its kind in Southeastern Massachusetts

The Hearing Center at Eye Health Vision Centers is the first Audiology Practice in Southeastern Massachusetts to open a complete "Virtual Sound Room" at its 51 State Road, North Dartmouth location.  This Virtual Sound Room allows the Audiology staff to reproduce real-life situations where hearing problems most commonly occur. In so doing, patients and their families can more easily relate to hearing losses, and the staff can clearly demonstrate the practical benefit of various hearing aids.

This state-of-the-art Virtual Sound Room creates audio-visual presentations using a Bose Surround Sound System and integrates this with speech mapping, sound tracking and computer evaluation.  It reproduces real-life sights and sounds of crowded restaurants, airports, shopping malls and social gatherings to allow the patient and his/her family to experience and identify the patient's actual hearing problems.

Our brand new hardware and software enables the Audiologist, through a multimedia approach to:

• Illustrate why a hearing impaired patient can hear people talk, but cannot distinguish words;

• Display the patient's hearing in comparison with sounds of daily living including the voices of family members.

• Demonstrate to the family of a hearing impaired patient what its actually like to hear the way the hearing impaired patient hears.

• Simulate what the hearing impaired patient would be able to hear when wearing hearing aids.

This new technology, also known as "Visible Speech", allows the Audiologist to graphically illustrate to both the patient and their family, exactly what types of sounds are being missed in daily life.  By examining the hearing impaired patient's hearing loss in such graphic and easily understandable detail, the Audiologist is able to fully program the new digital hearing aids to match the areas of hearing loss.

Visible Speech Mapping (VSM) provides a unique opportunity for the patient and family to experience and understand the benefits of quality hearing aids.  "Seeing" the benefits of digital hearing aids is important in the auditory rehabilitation process for the patient.  Another key advantage of VSM is that the dynamic features of the newer digital hearing aids can be more easily demonstrated to the patient.

Visible Speech Mapping utilizes actual live speech (clinician's and family members or significant others) as the input signal for the testing.  This provides an interesting and familiar stimulus for the patient and family and, at the same time, live speech is the type of signal the hearing instrument is required to process. VSM provides a dynamic presentation of how much "speech" is reaching the patient's eardrum.  When measured in the unaided ear canal, VSM is used to counsel the patient and third party on the effect of the hearing loss on understanding speech (by showing how much speech is not audible).  A better understanding of the hearing loss usually makes it easier for the patient and third party to accept and commit to rehabilitation help.  VSM is also a fast and accurate approach to successfully program hearing instruments for fitting and troubleshooting.

The Hearing Loss Simulator allows the family to "hear" a simulation of the patient's hearing loss.  This is a valuable tool for counseling and educating significant others in the effect of the hearing loss.  A built-in sound library provides an opportunity to demonstrate music, speech in quiet, speech in noise, and other environmental sounds for this simulation.  This process is "dynamic" and also allows the clinician to demonstrate simulated benefit with hearing instruments as well as the effect of further change in hearing thresholds.

The Master Hearing Aid feature allows the clinician to demonstrate the benefit of amplification to a patient who has never worn a hearing aid. Master Hearing Aid is an alterative to using a stock hearing aid to demonstrate the benefits of amplification to an inexperienced user.  The system applies the fitting rules by default to the patient's audiogram and simulates a hearing aid while the patient listens to this signal through the headphones.

Virtual Sound Room ~ Page 2