Hearing Aids and Zoom
People around the world have been turning more and more to video calls to chat with colleagues, customers and friends and family too. Video communications have replaced face-to-face meetings with popular apps like Zoom. It’s not just for work by video chat but happy hours too. Some of us are now getting ‘Zoom fatigue’ as non-stop online interaction is tiring for our eyes, minds and ears. If you, your colleagues, friends and loved ones, are losing your hearing then video communications may be more difficult to use, they may also make you more tired and frustrated.
Zoom Fatigue
Audiologists and researchers have begun to observe a new challenge called “concentration fatigue,” the increase in listening effort required to hold and continue a normal conversation and listening level. Professor Mario Svirsky, a professor of hearing science at NYU Langone Health medical centre says, “It’s not necessarily persistent fatigue but a measurable increase in listening effort. A little noise in the background can push you over a tipping point where communication becomes much more difficult and you have to do a lot of work. You may participate in a meeting for two hours and, at the end, you are wiped out.” People with good hearing experience this fatigue, people who are losing their hearing can become exhausted.
Hearing Communication Factors
Without physical, face-to-face meetings our human interactions lose some non-verbal cues. For people who are losing their hearing this can make it harder to lipread accurately, interpret sign language and read body language. Then there is the stress of unstable audio, time delays, and pixelated images. This stress can build up and up. “If you’re just missing one or two words or a little bit of information, it can have a snowball effect,” says NYU Langone postdoctoral fellow Ariel Hight. This affects how well you perform in a meeting.
Hearing Care Solutions
‘Zoom fatigue’ can set in. This doesn’t need to happen. If you, or your loved ones, are experiencing hearing loss then fitting and wearing a suitable hearing aid will restore the quality of sounds that you hear. Many of the latest models of digital hearing aids can connect directly to Zoom so you can hear the audio directly through your hearing aid. Just turn on your Bluetooth, then adjust the Settings on your hand phone or computer, and the sounds from your video conferencing apps are transmitted directly to your hearing aid.
If you are losing your hearing it could be time to zoom down to Clarisound to have a face-to-face consultation and free hearing check from one of Clarisound’s professional audiology consultants.
Changing Lives 