Well, I wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t attended a talk about new technology coming to hearing aids at my local HLAA chapter meeting. The speaker, Larry Medwetsky, was a retired full professor at Gallaudet University here in Washington DC, and his profession required him to stay abreast of these developments. The tech industry is not doing outreach to our community of hearing-loss consumers, and neither are the government regulators who are developing the standards for uniform application of the technology all over the country, so your hearing aids will gain you access everywhere coast to coast.

Think about the difference between cable TV, which requires the physical installation of ugly cables all over your house and in your rooms, versus streaming, which requires only a modem and router in a corner, plugged into an outlet, and a little thing you hook onto your TV. That is the difference between telecoil, which requires physical installation of a cable, and Bluetooth. Advocating for telecoil is like advocating for cable TV.

No one is installing cable anymore, all my friends have dropped their expensive subscriptions and pulled out the wires. While cable is not exactly going to disappear, just like hard-wired telephones aren’t going to totally disappear, these are technologies of the past. So don’t invest in the past. Look toward the future. Bluetooth is the future.