Conceived by leading audiologists at the University of California at San Francisco and implemented by silicon valley software veterans, LACE® listening software retrains the brain to comprehend speech up to 40% better in difficult listening situations such as:
Noisy Restaurants
Rapid speakers
Competing speakers
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Just as physical therapy can help rebuild muscles and adjust movements to compensate for physical weakness or injury, LACE will help you develop skills and strategies to deal with situations when hearing is inadequate.
Even people with normal hearing can be poor listeners. Good listening skills is one of the essential components in effective communication. Other components include rapid thought processing, auditory memory, use of language skills, and interactive strategies.
LACE Works Together With You
LACE is always adapting to your listening skills. The difficulty level of the task is based on the accuracy of your response to the previous task, so LACE is never too difficult or too easy.
LACE provides a variety of interactive and adaptive tasks that are divided into FIVE main categories:
We live and listen in an incredibly noisy world. In many situations, the noise around us makes it very difficult to listen effectively. However, if you want to hear well in life, you have to learn how to listen more effectively in noisy situations. Our research Shows that we can improve effective listening in noise with only a few training sessions.
In the "Speech in Noise" task, LACE will say a phrase in either a man's, woman's or child's voice. Then it will give a typed out version of what was said. It is the listener's job to indicate if the sentence was understood correctly. LACE will automatically adjust the difficulty level based on your past answers to keep you challenged and improving.
Many times we hear the voice of the person talking, but they simply talk too fast. If we could just get them to SLOW DOWN... better yet, if we could only listen faster! Our research has shown that effective LACE training enables the brain to "speed up", to effectively listen to someone when they are speaking rapidly.
In rapid speech, you will hear a phrase spoken by either a man, woman, or child. After the phrase is spoken, a typed out version of what was said will be shown. The listener will select how many words, if any, of the phrase was understood correctly. It is the listener's job to select how many ranging from none to every word. It is important that you be honest, because the speech will get faster and faster as LACE automatically adjusts to the users improvements.
Often competing talkers interfere with our ability to understand our own conversation. With effective LACE training we will learn to focus on a "target" voice, the voice we're trying to understand. This can make a world of difference to understanding and participating in a conversation.
This task focuses on improving upon being able to understand what is being said in the case that there is more than one person talking. A phrase will be spoken in a man's, woman's, or child's voice and LACE will tell the listener which voice to focus their attention upon and be able to accurately tell what the target voice is saying, and the task will get harder as you show improvements.
Asimple example of working Auditory memory is having a friend recite a list of numbers, and then suddenly stopping, asking you to repeat the last four numbers. To try to find the answer to the question, you have to "replay" the numbers back to yourself in your mind as you heard them. Since Auditory memory lasts for a few seconds, if there was no pause between the time your friend stopped reciting the list to the time where he asked you to repeat the last digits, then your Auditory memory would be able to pick up the last few numbers and recite them back quite accurately. However, if there was a pause between the time he stopped counting to the time he asked you to repeat the numbers, your recall would not be as high because the numbers have left your Auditory memory. LACE will help train you to improve your Auditory Memory & Cognitive Skills with our Target Word task which focuses on short and long term memory training; and the Missing Word task which can improve your speed of processing and use of contextual cues.
Throughout your training, LACE will present you with varoius strategies to help in daily communication activities; as well as helpful information about hearing loss and how to prevent it.
Example:
Remember that experience can help improve communication. Sometimes it is possible to become familiar with a particular pattern of speech. The more you talk with a person, the easier it becomes to understand, even if that person has poor speech habits.LACE Training
The LACE training helped me realize that while watching closed captioning on TV, my brain was not focusing on the speech. I am now trying to change that “passive” listening and concentrate more acutely on the sound while using the CC as backup.
Susan Jefferson
