Hearing aids, your latest accessory
Boomer Tech
My formerly near-sighted brother years ago tossed out his eyeglasses and contact lenses and opted for Lasik. Now he walks around Manhattan clear-eyed and unencumbered. I would be lost without a good deal of vision correction myself, but I am still clinging to my vintage frames. My brother and I would agree on the topic of hearing aids, however. We'd probably both opt for hardware that is discrete, just as many people do today.
But now there are hearing aids that are designed to be a bit easier on the eyes. The new Oticon Delta, from the Danish company Oticon Inc. (www.oticonusa.com), is replacing your dad's ''big beige banana" hearing aids with ''sleek and sexy" devices that come in ''cabernet red," ''Samoa blue," ''racing green," and more than a dozen other colors.
The Delta's sound receiver goes inside the ear, at the end of a thin, transparent wire. The ''sexy" part of the Delta is the triangular housing that goes behind the ear, and holds much of the digital brains of the device.
The Delta uses artificial intelligence to help clarify high-pitched sounds in noisy situations. Active boomers are going to need that kind of help to keep up with the pack in work and social situations, said Don Shum, vice president of Audiology & Professional Relations at Oticon.
Boomers are a stubborn lot, said Shum. They found more ways to damage their hearing than any previous generation (long live rock 'n' roll), yet they resist hearing aids because they make them feel old.
''We're trying to decrease the stigma," said Shum, who wants to make buying hearing aids less like buying a walker, and more like shopping for a Mini Cooper.
Mobile Computing
Power from our less-than-reliable New England sun
Solar power in New England? That's been been a hard sell in recent weeks. Sump pumps are where the money's been.
But Solar Style (www.solarstyle.com) hopes to put as many little solar panels between el sol and our mobile gadgets as possible. Its Oval Charger and Power Bar mimic the popular clamshell and candy bar designs, and come in a variety of color schemes.
The chargers cost less than $40 each, a small price to pay for looking and feeling virtuous. But there's no escaping the fact you are adding the equivalent of another cellphone (in size and weight) to your shoulder bag or backpack. The chargers gather light from the sun (and artificial sources, to a lesser extent) and store the energy in onboard batteries. A full charge takes six to eight hours.
Soho Tech
A keyboard that makes finding accents easy
Who can blame English writers for skipping the occasional accent, umlaut, or sub dot in a foreign word? It's hard to remember all of the crazy key combinations you need to insert some marks. Finding them in font menus is no picnic, either.
A missing accent can change a blessing into a curse, however. Just ask Olúkàyodé W. Olúwolé, whose last name (in his native language, Yorùbá) goes from ''God enters the house" to ''God destroys the house" when you skip the sub dot that is supposed to appear under the second ''o."
Olúwolé is co-president of Natick-based LANCOR Technologies, which could revolutionize the way bilingual students and business workers, not to mention food and travel writers, work. LANCOR's keyboard, named KONYIN, replaces the unnatural way we insert an accent mark -- before we type a character --with a simpler approach. All you do with KONYIN is type the letter, hit the desired accent key on the keyboard, and voilà. The USB keyboard follows the standard QWERTY format, and includes a row of symbols frequently used by lawyers and other professionals. The KONYIN (www.konyin.com) comes with software that installs on your PC in seconds. Olúwolé promises that Mac and Linux versions will be available by the end of the year.
