Hearing aid or spying device?

[rialvestro]

These have been out for a while now but in case you haven't heard of them there are these hearing aids that are designed to look like bluetooth head sets for a cell phone.

Now the issue I have with these head sets is that they advertise that you'll be able to pick up several different conversations in a crowded room and hear up to something like 50 feet away. The reason I find issue with this is that no one can hear that well normally so why are they making that a main selling point.

I kinda doubt they're really that good because they always exadgerate what products can do but seriously a hearing aid is ment to help someone who is hard of hearing to hear like a normal person it is not ment to pick up private conversations.

Now I have no issue with a hearing aid being disguised as something else. There wouldn't be demand to hide them if it wasn't embarrassing to some people. Same reason contacts were intented as an alternitive to wearing glasses.

But why in the world would you design something ment as an AID to give people better hearing than a normal person. An aid is suppose to just help you be normal not surpass it.

If you're able to hear better than normal that's a spying device and an invasion of privacy. If someone should overhear a conversation normally that's the fault of a person having a private coversation in public. However if you overhear a private conversation from across the street as 2 people are talking in their own home that is an invasion of privacy.

Of course of the product doesn't work as advertised this would really matter but still why make that the main selling point? Getting your normal hearing back and having a hearing aid that doesn't look like a hearing aid wasn't enough of a seller on it's own? They had to add spying on your neibers as the main selling point?

[RabbitWho]

Anyway with what you're talking about I'm sure the ad was exaggerating and the point they were making is that you'll be able to tune into a conversation you're having with your friend and not be distracted by background noise, which is something that is easy for us to do but hard for hearing impaired people. A friend of mine used to just turn her hearing aid off when we were in a crowded place because she couldn't focus on what we were saying as all she was getting was a lot of noise.
She would just try to lip read and of course we would all forget to look at her and it was a disaster.
This aid sounds amazing if it can actually allow people to have a conversation in a crowded room or a noisy place.


This is completely off topic but my students told me there is a thing now that can read the speech patterns in your brain so if you're paralyzed you can still communicate through a computer?
Does anyone know if this is true and where i can go to read about it?

[rialvestro]

Apr 24, 2010 10:47:23 GMT -5 RabbitWho said:

This is completely off topic but my students told me there is a thing now that can read the speech patterns in your brain so if you're paralyzed you can still communicate through a computer?
Does anyone know if this is true and where i can go to read about it?

Never heard of that before but it sounds amazing and horrible at the same time.

The great thing about the internal monolog going on in your brain is that no one else can hear it. If you had a computer projecting your thoughts then that would also allow other people to hear things you don't want them to know about.

If there's a way to keep private thoughts private while allowing them to communicate that's great but if not you could end up with a lot of unwanted communication as well.