A Great App To Help You Hear Better In Restaurants (and other places too)!

Hello Lafayette and friends beyond!

One of the most common complaints I hear about hearing in difficult scenarios is in a restaurant.  It seems like restaurants tend to get noisier and more challenging to hold a conversation.  Why would that be?  Well…  It seems a lot of modern restaurants will have concrete floors, with tall ceilings.  This is pretty bad when it comes to acoustics (Lower ceilings and carpet are much better).  It can cause delays in the signal that you want to hear arriving to your ears with a slight delay.  This in turn, causes the original signal (e.g. someone's voice) to not sound as clear as it would without reverberation.  To complicate things further, there are usually many other people present, possibly loud enough music to be a nuisance instead of adding ambiance and kitchen noise.  A challenging situation no matter how great your hearing might be!

Fortunately, there is now an app for your smartphone that allows you to look up or rate a location you wish to go to by how loud it is.  How cool is that?!  If the place has never been rated, you could be the first and help others!  The app allows you to measure with your phone's microphone the noise levels and also allows you to rate how loud you feel the place is.  The app is called iHearU and was created by a Doctor of Audiology who (like yours truly) is a passionate hearing advocate.  The app is free and available from both the Apple app store and the Google Play store.

I use this app and highly recommend it to others!  If you would like to read more about the app, click here:  http://www.ihearu.co/

If you would like to learn more about how to protect your hearing, call today to make an appointment with me.

Your friend in Audiology,

Dr. Erik Breitling