On Wednesday, March 14, the Bunbury Better Hearing Group sponsored a public meeting with guest George Daniell from Telecommunications product company Accesscomm.
Mr Daniell talked about and demonstrated the new Cap-Tel telephone at the St. Augustine Church in South Bunbury.
The phone enables a hearing impaired person to read, in clear printed form from a 175-millimetre wide screen, the conversation of the second party.
It is based on word recognition technology but also has a person monitoring the conversation to manually correct any word out of context.
It has all the capabilities of a normal telephone, with the added benefit of being able to read any messages.
The key to its use is to immediately on contacting the other person to let them know the phone is in the screen mode as there is a three second delay between the voice and the words on the screen.
Many seriously hearing impaired people have real difficulty understanding a conversation over a telephone.
The 16 people who attended the presentation realised that the phone would be of immense value to those that had difficulty in using a conventional telephone.
After the talk and demonstration, the audience questioned George for nearly half an hour, a sure sign of the potential for the Cap-Tel phone.
At the end of the meeting, all present expressed a debt of gratitude to George for travelling down from Perth to demonstrate the Telephone.
The group is planning for another Public Meeting in June based around the benefits of Bluetooth, which is now available in hearing aids.
They are looking for an audiologist to address the group on other technological improvements in hearing aids.
The Bunbury Better Hearing Group is part of Better Hearing Australia and is a not for profit organisation.
Its members are made up of Hearing Impaired people, many being seriously impaired.
The Group, with fully qualified instructors, learns lip-reading, hearing awareness and limited Auslan sign language.
They also provide social support for the seriously hearing impaired members of the Bunbury District who wish to join the Group.
