Degraded telecoil performance with assistive listening systems
Ryan T. Chester · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2017
For more than 50 years, telecoils have been used in hearing aids to bypass the microphone, inductively couple to the telephone receiver, and improve audibility. Because they are widely used in European teleloop systems for public address applications, stringent homologation testing is required before a device is accepted in any government contract. This testing includes benchmarking the performance of their directional nature, frequency response, signal-to-noise, and robustness to orientation within the inductive field. Optimizing a telecoil for one situation usually means degraded signal to noise and reduced bandwidth in other situations. This presentation will discuss susceptibility of telecoils to perform poorly due to environmental factors related to position and orientation.