By Alex Mussomeli
Alex Mussomeli, who is teaching himself Japanese, streams sound directly into his hearing devices.
As I’ve gotten older, my hearing loss no longer obstructs my daily life. I’ve learned how to live with my impediment rather than struggle with it. Overcoming that challenge was possible because of the remarkable technological advances in cochlear implants and hearing aids.
I also had friends and family supporting me. I am genuinely grateful. This combination has allowed me to become the person I am today and be entirely mainstreamed in my local school with my peers.
Despite this, I always had one issue with my hearing loss: watching media of any sort and being able to thoroughly understand what is being said.
Whenever I tried to watch a TV show with friends or family or alone, I would understand around 90 percent in general via my hearing aid and implant and less than that if I was tired. While 90 percent is a high statistic and did allow me to follow the story, I would miss important dialogue. I had to work hard to gain a full understanding, while it seemed effortless for everyone, which frustrated me.
There were practical tools I could employ, such as captions, and they did help a lot, but captions weren't always a good option when I was younger. There would be times when I would want to watch a video or a movie on DVD and find out that it didn't come with captions.
Captions on sites like YouTube are auto-generated, so they weren't a perfect or permanent solution to my challenge. As great and helpful as captions were and are, they always felt like a temporary solution.
Eventually, as technology progressed, streaming the audio from videos directly to my hearing devices became an option as either standalone or as something to pair with the captions. Once I learned this was an option, I gave it a try and found that the audio was much clearer to me than before. It was so clear that I didn't need the captions to understand what I was watching!
Streaming truly revolutionized my life because, for the first time, I had more of a permanent solution to a problem that was an issue for years. Of course, sometimes I could not fully understand the video, but that was usually more due to poor audio quality versus something like incorrect captions.
Poor audio is a problem everyone has to deal with, not just those with hearing loss. And now, when I listen to music, I can stream it directly into my hearing devices, just like how others do with headphones or earbuds. This works also with videos on my social media feed, attachments in my email inbox, and many other media examples.
After streaming music and videos to my ears for a while, I realized that my issues and general situation began to be similar, if not identical, to everyone else's! I was utterly overjoyed in that unforgettable moment because, for the first time, streaming—for all its benefits and shortcomings—made me feel like I didn't have a hearing loss.
With his family, Connecticut high school student Alex Mussomeli has been a longtime friend and supporter of HHF, including selling his own artwork to benefit HHF when he was 11 years old.
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