How the telecommunications industry is meeting the needs of the hearing aid wearer
Mobile communication
David Dzumba, Senior Manager, Global Accessibility, Nokia
We work out of the Dallas Fort Worth area of the United States. I want to run through how we are organised in our company for accessibility. Our group is basically in the research and development area of the company. There are sometimes different areas which house the organisations, ours being part of the research and development organisation. It puts us closer to product development, closer to research opportunities that are maybe two to five years down the road, which we call advanced development activities, and that allows us to kind of be part of the support phase on the products after they are launched on to the market. It kind of works well that way, we think.
Just quickly, a little background on improvements in access. You maybe familiar with the Nokia loop sets. We have loop sets LPS1 through 4. The different numbers basically mean they work with different interfaces of different models of handsets.
What we have been doing is taking advantage of some of the quality improvements and some of the different technology changes in the products. With the LPS4, the idea of that is it uses the batteries from the phone and doesn't require any batteries. What consumers have said is the previous versions of the LPS required three hearing aid batteries each. They aren't cheap and, as they wear down and you replace them frequently, it's expensive. It's moving those technologies along, hopefully in the right direction.
Motorola has loopsets, and there are a variety of third party companies that have some devices. We have some adaptors that hook to our phones that allow connectivity to textphone TTY devices in the US. We have some capabilities in the handsets, in our case we use Baudot tones, so it passes them to the TTY devices.
This morning we talked a lot about the hearing aid compatibility issues. I am going to spend a little more time on that as we go through. I think that kind of seems to be the top issue in a lot of areas in the world. It's big in the US because of the regulations and legislation. I have read the INCOM reports, and some of the different reports from consumer organisations in Asia and Europe, so it is probably one of our top priorities right now to try to resolve that. I will go through what ANSI is, and what some of the impact is on our company.
We have another development in there, for the mild to moderate hearing loss. The speaker before me talked about Sound ID. That's whom we are working with. We have a project in work right now in which we are looking to take that technology into the handset. The HAC activities require solutions for hearing aids, T-coil hearing aids, cochlear implants. Another side of the market is mild to moderate hearing loss. That's specifically what that's working with. We are looking at adding that solution into the handset. We have a lead programme in work in which we are trying to see how technically it works. I am giving you a little bit of foresight of where we are going. Sometimes it depends on how it works technically.
The next thing is moving forward without wires. Bluetooth is on our plans, to take away the wire from the present loopset down to the mobile device. Now you just have a loop that you would wear around your neck, so it works pretty well.
Mobile terminated text telephony. There is a solution here from RNID that works on the communicator presently. We are looking at some of the same solutions in the US, although the technologies and the standards are different. You have V21 solution in the UK. In the US we have a Baudot solution. It's just 45 baud. That's sort of the standard in the US.
We have features in the products that we try to keep. When you advance on to other technologies, you want to look at Bluetooth or GPRS, or other technologies, but some of the core things we try to keep in the products are the issues of phones that vibrate, flash, or have some kind of indicator that they have a call. Ringing tones -- there's just a multitude of things in the devices now. We don't want to lose those things as the technology moves forward.
We have what we think are four major areas for accessibility:
a) specifically direct accessibility, and how we deal with that is that we have standard product requirements or guidelines. Our company has basically eight standard products -- things that are environmental issues and mechanical issues. There is one called accessibility. Mainly what we encompass are the universal design concepts.
We are not building specific products for segments of the market. We want to make sure we kind of retain some of the universal design concepts when we start to design a product. If it's used in Beijing, Southwood or Dallas, anywhere in the world, they have to review those requirements. There may be there are some things you cannot do. Maybe the market you are going for does not require some things. It's an idea to ensure that the companies and engineering organisations are looking at those.
We have round keypads. We have numbers that go around the screen. We have keyboard-type devices with the screen between them. So the issue of that isn't to say you have to design everything with a 3 by 4 design. The idea of those things is to allow creativity, design, flexibility within the engineering organisations, but try to retain some of those things. The nib on the 5 is an issue. It's a nib, or a tip. We want to make sure there is some technical spec that can be measured and adhered to on products.
b) Accessibility of the standard options or accessories. We have loopsets. With the opening up of imported products, there are other companies with accessories that can be adapted. In the US, we have adaptors that TTY devices can be connected to.
c) The third item would be compatibility with third party assistive devices. One of the areas we are working on is to make sure the software in the products is available. You hear things about Series 60 different platforms, the open platforms. We want to make sure we continue to keep open access to that information so that third party developers can develop the applications. That's one of the big areas we are focusing on now.
We do not have the engineering resources or the staff to go and develop software solutions for every organisation or every consumer group out there. Being involved with issues of vision, mobility, cognitive, hearing, and then the ageing issue over the top of that, we will just never grow that big to be able to do that, so we are working on opening up that information to organisations that can do that. Examples would be RNID and the textphone software. They understand what needs to be done and how to do that. Text to speech for the blind, we will help on technical problems when they cannot access communication through the handset.
d) Lastly, custom modifications i.e. companies who want to drill holes in the phone to access handsets for modification. We do not like people drilling into the handsets. There are issues of warranty etc. It's an area that we have identified, but we do not have a whole lot of experience on what to do in this area.
One of the big opportunity areas is interoperability, to be able to test the system devices with handsets. A lot of companies will say you should put a standard port in your handset. I don't necessarily know if a 2.5 mm socket is standard, some say 3 mm, some say use Bluetooth or USB. You can just continue to go down those avenues, so interoperability is a large and difficult area
Fig.1 Numbers of people affected by the Hearing Aid Compatibility Act
Really, the big area is the hearing aid compatibility issue as indicated in Fig. 7. Everybody is familiar with the talk about the FCC² ruling. I saw the numbers about the 225% of the models have to be available. That is a requirement on the operators. On the manufacturers, we are required to have two handsets per protocol available in the fall of 2005 that meet certain emission levels. The emission levels are specified in the ANSI C63.19 standard "American National Standard for Methods of Measurement between Wireless Communication Devices and Hearing Aids". It talks specifically about how you are going to establish your test plans, how you are going to measure the devices and how you record the specific data on there.
From our standpoint, from Nokia GSM, we have to have just two handsets in the fall of 2005 that will meet the emission levels of U3 rating. In the fall of 2006, we have to have two handsets which meet with the telecoil coupling, UT. The operators have the burden of 25%, and then 50%, and so on. There are some indications it could be 100% of the models out in 2008. That's what they call the analogue sunset date in the US, where the operators don't have to have the capabilities to support analogue devices. They may or may not, depending on what their coverage is.
We have two working groups under the hearing aid organisations run by ATIS. It's an organisation that has taken the responsibility -- we have formed what we call an "incubator", which allows us to focus specifically on the HAC Act, made up of manufacturers, test houses and operators.
We are really just working on the technical solutions. We are looking at the testing, to make sure we can reliably test the same handsets in a variety of test houses and get (2) the same results, so that we can label the boxes. The requirement for labelling is they want a label on the box that would indicate the phone's rating. For example, they want M4, which means it is a microphone that meets ANSI level 3 or 4. The T would be the telecoil coupling requirements for B2, 3, or 4. It's specified in the ANSI it will meet U3 or better. It was hoped you would rate the handsets and hearing aids and get a system number, but this is the direction we have taken.
So, what goes on the box, what kind of information goes in the box, and then the biggest part of it is the outreach. How are we going to communicate to the consumers what to look for? There is a whole lot of discussion on labelling. People want graphics and bar charts. It's an ongoing discussion.
We have projects working on the battery, base band, and looking at the technical issues. Specifically, we are in a test phase, trying to get the ANSI standard finalised. We are trying to get all the test houses to test samples of the devices, so we know where we all stand, and each test house, no matter if they take the same phone to different houses, gets the same results, so that we can label and communicate what that device is.
We have two devices in the fall 2005 and two more in the fall of 2006, but I am not going to run through much more; it's kind of just running. These are just some details about HAC, and a little bit more emphasis. The ramifications of the HAC; these are some of the numbers we have got from there. The HAC Act takes into consideration the four million groups here. We don't want to miss some opportunities we have with the top group. It covers the area from mild to moderate. On the ramifications of some of this from the HAC angle, my concerns are that, when you get regulated into the issue of meeting the ANSI standard, you sometimes result in minimal compliance or incomplete standards.
We have stated that ANSI still has work to do. They just take time. Sometimes we have concerns that, when we do meet and bring all the stuff together, it still may not be the full solution. Again, we have done some testing, ANSI standard and performance experienced. The issue is: is it going to work for the consumer? Once we develop, finish the standard testing and go off and do consumer studies, is it really going to be the answer? I don't know if U3 is going to work as a variety. It may prevent production of proven accessories. We have a number of resources, and we have to direct those people to things that have a timetable directed to us.
Some of the different activities would be some of the tracks of development. Again, we have a HAC Act that is very defining, but we have a lot of issues from section 255, which is encompassing the role in the US, so there is confusion between the different things. We don't want to create adversarial relationship between industry and advocacy groups. Relationships with the groups are good. Sometimes, when you bring them closer, you really can start a dialogue. "I know you have a U3 phone, but it doesn't work so it's obviously not right, and we are going to take it back." This document talks about the timeline, some information you can look at later at your leisure. It takes account of ongoing issues and kind of where we are going.
Finally, we want to make sure that we keep the industry relationships favourable. In my opinion, they are at the moment. There are some good things in the IEC European standards for hearing aid and handset testing that will probably be pretty good. Continue to keep dialogue with hearing aid manufacturers. Continue the development of the activity of Sound ID for mild and moderate hearing loss.
Bundle phones, accessories and services through co-operation. There are parts that we can do, parts the operators and advocacy groups can do. It's making sure everyone takes on their responsibilities to make sure the consumers, at the end of the day, understand what's involved.
Improve awareness. We do not have a good answer all the time. We have some solutions in some of the devices. We do not have a good way in which maybe we communicate that. There is work that we have to do, too, so there are a lot of things we are looking at.
Discussion
MIKE DUXBURY, VODAFONE, AND PHONEABILITY: David, I wanted to add, Nokia has an extremely good, informative accessibility website. Is this an area that maybe Nokia could exploit to deliver the sort of stuff that you are doing, which seems to be very informative, to ensure that the rest of the world really are keeping up to date with the progress that Nokia are making out there?
DAVID DZUMBA: We have a web page www.nokia accessibility.com, in an area in which we are trying to communicate. We also mention about the IEC, and others like that, on the web page.
PATRICK ROE, INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY IN SWITZERLAND: You actually partly answered this, or made reference to it. There was a need to involve users in the testing. Is that not currently done? Did I understand that ANSI are not involving users and, in particular, hard of hearing users at this stage?
DAVID DZUMBA: No. We do. In the past, we have used some focus groups on products that we believe have potential solutions, and then we collect that information and use it for additional research or enhancements into the products.
Some of the newer products we have had some feedback on, maybe adding some equalisation in there. Some devices have equalisers in there. Some things have automatic gain control on the loopsets. Some people maybe don't want the wire, for a variety of reasons: getting out of the car, on the jacket. We have a variety of things.
(2) Federal Communication Commission, FCC 03-168, August 14, 2003, Report and Order
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