Meeting house listening devices improves participation

[pam]

This is way cool.

https://www.lds.org/church/news/straining-to-hear-each-sunday-meetinghouse-listening-devices-dramatically-improve-participation?lang=eng

[NeedleinA]

My mother has used her hearing as an excuse/reality for years as to why her participation at church has been less than stellar.
In a nice loving way, I just emailed her this article. I've talked to her about these devices for years, but it is nice to have an article to help back me up. Thanks @pam

[NightSG]

13 hours ago, NeedleinA said:

My mother has used her hearing as an excuse/reality for years as to why her participation at church has been less than stellar.
In a nice loving way, I just emailed her this article. I've talked to her about these devices for years, but it is nice to have an article to help back me up. Thanks @pam

But does her ward even have the transmitter, much less working receivers?  My previous bishop had such bad hearing it was occasionally helpful to supplement talking with as much ASL as I could manage when his hearing aid batteries died, but he never mentioned this, (and more than once after he was released as bishop, walked out of the chapel to go listen from the media center where they had a wall mounted speaker he could sit right next to) though I had pointed out to him that several of us have difficulty picking out speech from background noise.  (In a quiet environment, my hearing is apparently better than average  - probably part of why I love caves and other unusually quiet places - but even a desk fan several feet away can cause me to miss 20-30% of words spoken at conversational volume.  Louder ambient noise and it's hard for me to even tell when a person is speaking.)

Personally, I just figured the Spirit would relay anything important over the screaming kids.  Then after a few Sundays of having to watch to even tell when it was close to Sacrament time, I figured if anything important happened, the Spirit could wake me up at home.

[JohnsonJones]

I really should have my hearing checked.  I had noticed I seemed to be getting a harder and harder time hearing when people were talking, but in a quiet place my hearing was still excellent.  I didn't know there was such a thing as losing hearing in situations where multiple people were talking, but if true, this makes complete sense with what has been going on with my hearing for a while now.