Page 6 of Hearing Systems by Phonak AG

fm for infants and children ­ because learning is a question of being on the right wavelength fm optimizes speech intelligibility from infancy to adulthood in all situations where distance noise and reverberation interfere with communication the path to better hearing begins with choosing the right hearing instrument however even hearing instruments properly adjusted to a child s personal need cannot provide an adequate signal-to-noise ratio in all situations speech understanding can be severely affected by · ambient noise e.g in the classroom · the distance between speaker and listener e.g in lecture halls · reverberation e.g in large rooms the best way to overcome these problems is to include fm technology in every child s amplification system and ensure good speech intelligibility in all environments fm systems pick up speech signals directly at the source and transmit them clearly and without distortion directly to the ear for many years now teachers audiologists parents and speech therapists have been successfully using fm systems to help ensure optimal speech understanding at all times the advantages of fm technology for infants children and adults are clear in infancy the communication between parents and infants is always important particularly for hearing impaired toddlers an improved signal-to-noise ratio and the extended range provided by an fm system can help facilitate this parent toddler interaction these advantages increase the quantity and quality of speech and language experiences during those critical early learning years in kindergarten kindergartens are always lively noisy places and it can often be virtually impossible for a hearing impaired child to understand one voice among many by using an fm system the speech is picked up directly at its source and transmitted to tiny receivers attached to the hearing instruments fm systems can overcome background noise problems by improving signal-to-noise ratio by up to 20 db at school in a classroom the distance between teacher and child dramatically reduces speech intelligibility the level of a signal which is 70 db spl at the source is just 58 db spl at 2 meters and 52 db spl at 4 meters since the ambient noise level in the room remains the same this causes a decrease in speech intelligibility particularly for a hearing impaired child an fm system reduces this distance to just 20­30 centimeters which is the average distance of the transmitter microphone to the speaker s mouth 6

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