In the Loop

This sign signals that those with a telecoil hearing aid can tune into the sound being transmitted from a hearing loop. Photo by Len Villano.

Hearing aids are a godsend for those with hearing difficulties, but there are some important places, like churches or auditoriums, where they just don’t work very well.

“Hearing aids work remarkably well for what they’re designed to do, but they’re just not designed to make a person hear in a place like a church,” said audiologist Juliette Sterkens. “You can hear in normal conversation…but you still have difficulty hearing in large spaces because of the background noise.”

In order to make sure their patrons can hear clearly, two churches in the county, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Sturgeon Bay and Shepherd of the Bay Lutheran Church in Ellison Bay, recently installed a unique system, called a hearing loop. The hearing loop pipes sound directly from a microphone into a person’s hearing aid, eliminating the background noise that normally muddles everything up.

Shepherd of the Bay parishioner Stan Whiteman, who advocated for the installation of the loop at his church, said the results are dramatic.

“The first assembly after we’d installed this loop we had a parishioner who said it was the first time he ever understood everything the choir sang,” said Whiteman.

The system itself is pretty simple, both to understand and use. It starts with a little black box that’s hooked up to a sound system. The box is also attached to a copper wire, which circles the area where you want to project the sound from your system. When the system is turned on, it creates a magnetic field along the wire that can be picked up by a small copper wire, called a telecoil, which is found in many hearing aids.

All it takes is a push of a button on the hearing aid to turn the telecoil on and, suddenly, those with telecoil hearing aids can clearly hear what’s coming over the sound system.

“About 60 percent of all hearing aids have telecoils,” said Sterkens. “But if there are no loops then why would audiologists talk about it?”

Sterkens, who hails from the Netherlands originally but now lives in Oshkosh, Wis., is a big advocate for “looping” facilities and said hearing loops were commonplace in deaf and hard of hearing schools in Europe as early as the ‘70s. They’re just now coming into fashion in the U.S., however, and the movement is starting in churches.

“It starts [there] because that’s where people go 50 or so times a year and want to hear, and churches want their members to hear well,” said Sterkens.

Pastor Matt Sauer of St. Peter’s said he decided to install a hearing loop after hearing it in action at a church in Fond du Lac. The installation took about a day, he said, and cost around $5,000.

“People who’ve been using it are saying excellent things about it. They can clearly and distinctly hear every word spoken,” said Sauer.

According to Sterkens, the hearing loop transmits with greater quality than FM systems designed to help the hearing impaired, but Sauer said there’s another, less technical, boon to the system: people don’t have to “broadcast” their hearing loss by picking up clunky headphones which show everyone that they’re hearing impaired.

“All it is, is raising your hand up to your ear to press the button, and it’s done,” said Sauer. “All they have to do is ask their audiologist if they have the telecoil in their hearing aid and activate it.”

Sam Whiteman shows off the components that make up a hearing loop system. Photo by Len Villano.

Sauer’s aware of about 10 people currently that are using the hearing loop system, but he’s hoping more of his parishioners will utilize it as they become aware of it. Whiteman said there’s a similar number of people using the loop at Shepherd of the Bay.

“I think when more people get educated about it, it’ll get better,” said Jane Whiteman, Stan’s wife.

Jane herself use hearing aids, and the Whitemans have a home hearing loop system installed for use with their TV. The home system cost about $250 and was easy to install, according to the Whitemans.

“Oh, it’s wonderful,” said Jane. “I can hear voices on the television that I couldn’t hear at all before.”

The Whitemans are looking to start an advocacy group that would push to get more places in Door County “looped” and would encourage anyone with questions about hearing loops to contact them.

Sterkens, who maintains the website loopwisconsin.com and has been advocating “looping” for years, said it took a long time for the list of looped facilities on her site to grow to the number it is now, but it’s been getting easier to push for hearing loops as time’s gone on.

“Once you get a couple places looped, that’s when people will say, ‘Hey, we need to look at this,’” said Sterkens.