Easiest Way to Improve Hearing in Noise | LACE Ai Pro Review

This App is by far the easiest and cheapest way to improve your hearing and background noise.

Hey guys! Cliff Olson, Doctor of Audiology and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona, and in this video I'm doing a detailed review of the Lace Ai Pro Auditory Training app.

Have you ever had a knee, shoulder, or hip replacement? If you have, then you probably already know that it's very important to find an excellent surgeon to do this surgery, but the surgery to replace your damaged joint is actually the easy part.

The difficult part is recovering from the surgery. This usually means going to physical therapy for approximately six to 10 weeks for you to strengthen the muscles, joints, and ligaments around your new joint.

Now, if you choose not to do physical therapy, chances are you're never going to fully recover from the joint replacement and you're probably gonna have ongoing issues for years to come.

Well, the same can actually be said about treating your hearing loss with hearing aids. Just like finding a really good surgeon to perform your joint replacement, it's very important to find an excellent hearing care professional to fit you with hearing aids and to follow comprehensive AUDIOLOGIC best practices so you have the opportunity to achieve the highest level of hearing possible.

Of course, if you're looking for one of these excellent hearing care professionals, I highly recommend that you go to my website hearingup.com to find a vetted HearingUp network member in your area.

That being said, expecting maximum results from even the best, most expensive hearing aids fit by the best hearing care professional in the world is not realistic unless you also undergo auditory training.

Just like physical therapy strengthens the soft tissue around the joint replacement, auditory training significantly improves your brain's ability to process the sound that you get from your hearing aids. This is especially true when it comes to hearing better and background noise and understanding fast talkers, but here's the problem, unless you have a hearing care professional or a speech language pathologist that can actually perform auditory training with you, it can be very difficult to receive auditory training to improve your brain's ability to understand what you're hearing.

This is where app-based auditory training programs like Lace Ai Pro come into Play.

Now, lace, which stands for Listening and Communication Enhancements, has been around for quite some time now. It was initially developed back in 2006 by Doctors Robert Sweetow and Jennifer Sabes, but auditory training in general has been used since the mid 1990s.

LACE is the most tested and clinically validated form of auditory training with over 20 years of research and over 80 peer reviewed studies and clinical trials to prove its effectiveness.

LACE incorporates four different components to its auditory training. You have training for speech and noise to improve your speech comprehension in noisy situations, working memory to increase your mental speed of processing rapid speech to enhance your listening skills with rapid talkers and speech reading to better pick up on the visual cues of people talking to you.

Research has shown that LACE auditory training can result in up to a six decibel improvement in signal to noise ratio depending on the severity of your hearing loss. This roughly equates to a 60% in speech understanding and noise, and these benefits that you receive from lace auditory training are long lasting.

When I first became an audiologist, LACE was available in DVD format, meaning you had to place an order to get the DVDs to come to your house. Then you'd pop them into your computer or into your DVD player so you could do the training modules and there was five hours worth of auditory training on these DVDs.

Then it switched to a web-based format where you would actually log in online, you would do 11 different training modules and then you'd be finished.

Now, Neuroton ai, which is the company that created lace Ai, has lace in their new lace Ai pro auditory training app, and I have to say that it is better than ever.

Now, before I get into my detailed review of the new Lace Ai Pro Auditory training app, if you could do me a huge favor, click the like button, really helps out the channel, and if you are not yet subscribed to the channel with notifications turned on, go ahead and do that as well. It is greatly appreciated.

Also, let me know down in the comment section if you'd be willing to do auditory training if it meant that it would significantly improve your hearing with your hearing aids.

I'll also have a link to the Dr. Cliff version of Lace Ai Pro in the description if you want to check it out yourself, and there is a discount code for Dr. Cliff channel subscribers.

Okay, so the Lace Ai Pro app is only available through Lace Ai Pro Certified Hearing Care Centers. To gain access to the app, you have to purchase a license from one of these hearing care centers in the Neurotone Ai network.

This license will get you lifetime access to the Lace Ai Pro app, so even if they have feature improvements or future updates to the app, you'll get access to those as well.

And this is really important because the initial version of this app only comes equipped with their speech and noise training. The rest of the training modules for rapid speech, working memory and speech reading will not be available for the next several months. Of course, by the time you're watching this review video, they might already be available.

Of course, I will make separate videos for each of these different training modules that I'll have linked in the description of this video when they're completed.

Okay, so when you sign up for your license, either through myself or through one of these other certified hearing care centers, you'll get a text message that has a download link for either the Apple version of the app or the Android version of the app. You then use the same number to sign into the app.

From that point, you are guided by an avatar for the rest of the setup.

The nice thing about Lace Ai Pro is that during the setup, you can customize the content that is used for your training so you never get bored. This includes topics such as culture and exploration, education and development, fun facts and oddities, health and wellness jokes, memory lane trivia, and philosophy for speech and noise training.

It takes you through 30 total exercises where you are listening to speech through varying degrees of background noise ranging from very easy to very hard. When you hear a sentence or a phrase, you repeat it out loud or in your head, and then it shows you what the sentence or phrase actually said.

If you got it right, you can move on to the next exercise. If you miss it, you can either repeat it again to see if you can catch it the second time, or you can continue onto the next one.

Each training session takes between 10 and 20 minutes depending on how fast you go on the home screen. It shows your active streak, which is how many days consecutively you've performed training and your progress through your training modules.

You also have six different tabs on the home screen, including Learn Train, my Content, my Clinic, my Progress, and my Voices.

The Learn tab provides lessons on things such as communication strategies, optimizing your environment, personal awareness, and the importance of auditory training.

To start your next training session, just click on the train tab.

The My Content tab allows you to change the topics used in your auditory training.

The My Clinic tab shows you the information of your hearing care professional, the operating hours of their clinic, and the ability to book an appointment, visit their website or call the clinic right from the app.

The My Progress tab shows you your progress under rewards through the different training modules on your way to becoming an expert communicator. It also shows you where you currently are in your ability to perform in noisy situations under assessments, under achievements, it lets you see your milestones and total training time as you rack up training sessions.

A really cool new feature that Neurotone Ai is going to be releasing in their Lace Ai Pro app is the ability to use familiar voices for your training. Under the My Voices tab, you'll be able to have a communication partner record their voice to train an Ai avatar so you can use their voice during your training. This is perfect if you have someone in your life that you have a really difficult time understanding.

In the settings of the app, you can change your name under your profile, indicate whether or not you want to receive daily notifications to complete your training. Reach out to Lace Ai Pro support if you have any issues with the app, read the terms of service and the privacy policy or log out of your account.

One thing that's really cool from a hearing care professional perspective is that when we log into our professional portal, we can actually see what your lace speech and noise score is, which is very similar to your quick send score.

This actually tells us how good you are as separating speech from background noise. The lower your lace score is the better. If you have a score between zero and three decibels, then you have normal hearing and noise, three to seven decibels, and you have mild difficulty hearing and noise, seven to 15 decibels, and you have a moderate difficulty hearing and noise, and above 15 decibels, you have a severe difficulty hearing and noise, so like I mentioned a little bit earlier in this video, if doing this auditory training can improve your ability to hear in background noise, but up to six decibels, that is a massive improvement, especially when you consider that every one decibel of improvement is roughly equivalent to 10% improvement in background noise.

And I have to say, I absolutely love the fact that they've transitioned this into an app rather than having to log in online or ordering DVDs. I mean, just being able to pick up your smartphone and open an app so you can start doing your training, it get any easier than that.

This is especially true if you already have hearing aids or you have earbuds or headphones that you can use to do the auditory training, which means you can do auditory training pretty much anywhere, and now that you can customize the content in your training, you can even make it educational and dare I say, fun to do auditory training.

There's basically an endless supply of training content inside of the app, so you never have to be repeating any of the trainings, and it keeps it interesting at all times.

I also love the fact that it gives you real time feedback, so you always know where you stand in your training, and it always keeps you motivated to go back for more. Of course, it also helps that this auditory training actually helps you hear better.

In fact, most users report a significant improvement in their ability to understand speech and background noise after only one month of training using Lace Ai Pro.

In fact, even if you have hidden hearing loss, auditory processing disorder, or central processing disorder and you do not use hearing aids, you can still get benefit using Lace Ai Pro because it improves your brain's ability to process what you're actually hearing.

Of course, if you do have measurable hearing loss, you need to make sure that you treat that hearing loss with hearing aids before you start auditory training. Otherwise, you will not realize the full benefit of it.

Honestly, there are not a whole lot of negatives when it comes to using LACE Ai Pro for auditory training as long as you actually do the training modules, which is probably the biggest issue when it comes to self-guided auditory training.

While you can set reminders to do your training modules and the app is gamified to keep you interested in doing your auditory training, it will do nothing for you if you don't actually do the training.

If instead you do in-person auditory training with an audiologist or speech language pathologist, the likelihood of you actually doing the training is much higher because they're right there with you doing it.

Of course, while auditory training with a professional can ensure that you actually complete the training, it will be much more expensive considering that a lifetime license of Lace Ai PRO is only 4 99 and the performance benefit that you can get from auditory training can rival some of the best hearing aids in the world.

That will cost you thousands of dollars so long as you're willing to set aside between 10 and 20 minutes of auditory training per day for 30 days. If you're not willing to commit to that, then don't waste your money at the end of the day.

Lace Ai is by far one of the most underrated and cheapest ways to significantly improve your hearing ability with or without hearing aids. No wonder why it's one of the most popular auditory training programs on the planet.‍