Modern communications have cluttered the soundscape and the noise and distractions can create adversity for some in public spaces. San Williams dives into how assistive communication connects people and ensures everyone stays included.   

From smartphones and 5G to virtual meeting room apps, more forms of communication are bringing us closer and evolving the way we interact. So, one would think receiving information would be child’s play for everyone involved. Sadly, this isn’t necessarily the case.

A hearing-impaired university student may want to attend a lecture, fully equipped with communication technology such as video projection and audio amplification. Instead, their device struggles to home in on the voice audio because of the room’s acoustics and additional audience noise. Or, as our communities become more culturally diverse, a non-native language-speaking student may not be fluent in their new local dialect.

Communication in places like universities should be foolproof, but as the world increasingly gets smaller, fast-paced and even clustered, distractions and interferences leave certain groups falling between the gaps. These are the audiences Sennheiser Australia and New Zealand business communications director Jason Grbevski says ‘assistive communication’ aims to address.

“We want to ensure quality across environments while remembering there are different contexts, so the needs of someone using this technology in a nursing home will be different to a young person studying at university,” he says.

“When we talk about hearing augmentation and assistive listening, we are focused on enabling inclusion and giving those with an impairment the same experience as those without.”

Traditionally focused on hearing augmentation and helping those with impairments, Jason says assistive communication encompasses assistive listening and audience engagement platforms.

As far as technologies to help people in public spaces, such as houses of worship, the first inductions of assistive communication can be traced back to the 1930s when hearing loop systems were being developed for people with hearing aids.

Assistive communication still helps the hearing impaired but, for Williams AV vice president of international sales and business development Per Persson goes another step beyond.

“Assistive communication can overcome environmental noise in places like a university lecture hall where you may have students with perfect hearing, but because of ambient sounds, people chatting, etcetera, they struggle to hear or focus,” he says.

“Another aspect of what we address is language. There are cameras and various people who might communicate in another language in other countries, so the idea behind the communication system is that you can, through technology, support people who need to understand the message in a different language.”

Previously consisting of separate systems, the market now uses assistive communication as an umbrella term for a suite of devices that facilitate bi-directional communication or the ability to ‘talk back’ from a receiving device to an audience or presenter.

For Sennheiser, a significant part of its assistive communication solutions have come in radio frequency (RF) technology, i.e. delivering an audio signal to a receiving device from a transmitter.      Other methods employ infrared light transmission, according to Jason.

“Due to the processing power of smart devices, we can tailor the response and performance of a device to the specific needs of the user, rather than just deliver blanket audio for the masses,” he says.

Sennheiser’s MobileConnect is one product that takes this to the next level as it uses WiFi to stream a signal to smart devices running an iOS or Android application, enabling a targeted adoption of a signal for certain users with impairment, meeting their specific needs.

MobileConnect has received enhancements over the past year, adding an audience microphone function and allowing a smartphone to be used as a wireless mic during Q&A sessions facilitating      easier engagement for the presenter and both local and remote audience members.

“The product is scalable and designed to be used across multiple spaces in large campuses such as corporate environments or universities,” he explains.

The physical hardware is managed by the MobileConnect Manager, an enterprise-grade software platform that puts control of an entire MobileConnect network in a single, centrally managed point of administration and the key to unlocking MobileConnect’s full scalable capabilities as a facility-wide, bi-directional audio accessibility solution.

In addition to traditional augmented hearing solutions such as hearing aids, Amber Technology team leader brand management Michael Carman says ‘discreet hearing’ is a means of communication technology that can be made optional in noisy, disruptive situations and environments.

“A premise like a casino or sports bar, with multiple visual sources of content, is a place where you can’t have all audio turned up at one time. Discreet hearing enables a user to choose the audio content and to be able to listen to that audio discreetly,” he says.

Williams AV’s WaveCAST is a receiver app where a listener can do just this. After downloading the app, the listener can choose from multiple audio channels, direct to ear. Used as hearing augmentation, a presenter’s voice can be listened to in multiple languages, if required, be it English, Chinese and so forth.

Using infrared light to transfer audio wirelessly from a transmitter to a receiver, and commonly being used for hearing augmentation purposes as well as language interpretation, Australia is known for its preference for infrared information retrieval systems. Now, a new Bluetooth capability is looking to take a foot.

Also known as Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), Bluetooth Auracast is what many among the Bluetooth special interest groups, from Sony and Samsung to smaller companies, will become a new standard in assistive communication.

“What we believe is going to happen with Auracast down the line is it will become the standard in headphones, so if I want to concentrate a bit harder and not be distracted, I can put my regular headphones on and listen directly to the audio stream,” Per says.

Unlike normal Bluetooth, where the current standard is one-to-one (for example, connecting your earbuds to your phone), Auracast Bluetooth can do one-to-many, meaning it can be a viable alternative in a situation with a diverse audience who require hearing augmentation, language interpretation or whatever support needed.

There’s little to no hearing aids or headphones on the market today with Auracast Bluetooth compliance and given that people change their hearing aids relatively infrequently, Per says it could take several years before it becomes a widely spread technology for consumers and hearing aid users. Nevertheless, advantages like its signal range, overall, would make Bluetooth LE an attractive choice in the future.

“With Bluetooth, if you now have your phone in your office and you go 50m away, you’re probably going to lose your connection. Bluetooth LE has the advantage of having a larger signal range, which again makes it a viable technology for commercial assistive communication, so for Williams AV, we see a lot of promise,” Per explains.

Technology and communication have pulled down many walls for people, spanning locally and globally. With many environments still emitting unavoidable noise, and impairments like hearing loss prevalent among Australians, if not increasing, the expectation is the requirement for hearing augmentation will increase significantly.

For that reason, expectations are that hearing augmentation requirements will only increase significantly, bringing more advancements in the market including smarter systems, allowing for the adoption and native use of smart devices, as well as greater monitoring and maintaining of these technologies and customising apps for users in the future.

“The reason why we have a lot of IR systems in public spaces is that it’s an easy deployment system, but that then has the problem of discretion because someone must put up their hand if they need a device,” Amber Technology’s Michael says.

“We recently went to a university, and they had a webcast system, meaning all the audio was broadcast to the students over WiFi. It would allow students to bring in their smartphone and, with most having earbuds with a Bluetooth connection, Auracast would speed up the whole process with the transmitter going straight to the hearing aid or the earbuds. That’s a big benefit, and an example of how Auracast could change things.”