Listen to Your Voice {TOS Crew Review}

Listen to your voice.  Make sure you listen to your voice.  These are the words I’ve been saying to my son with speech issues for the past few weeks thanks to a great review item from the TOS Crew.  We received a Forbrain unit from Forbrain – Sound for Life Ltd to use and review in our homeschool.

The Forbrain is a specially designed headset that allows the wearer to hear their voice and increase their awareness of their voice.  It sounds complicated to me when you read about it, but when you wear the headset you’re going to say “oh I get it now!”.  

How does it work?  Simply, you put on the headset and you talk.  That’s it. You listen to your voice as you read a book outloud, or recite your multiplication tables, or just carry on a conversation with someone else.  The big thing is listening to your voice.  In not so simple terms the Forbrain headset uses bone conduction to speed up the sound of your voice and slightly change the frequency so it’s immediately being registered by your brain.  It creates an auditory feedback loop to help you hear yourself better than you would if you were merely listening to yourself or even listening to a recording of yourself.  

In our house this was used by two children.  The first child I had use the Forbrain is a 7 year old boy who does speech therapy.  He has several sounds and blends that he has trouble making.  Right now with the sounds he’s working on he really has to listen to himself say words to help him hear whether he made the sound correctly or not.  If he did it incorrectly then he corrects himself.  The Forbrain has been wonderful for this!  It really helps him to be able to focus on what sounds he’s making and how they are coming out.  He can then correct himself instead of me having to try to help him correct himself.  He still doesn’t have all his sounds down but this has been a great help for him.

How did he use it?  Well, for him he’s learning to read so I had him wear it as he was sounding out and doing his phonics lessons for the day.  He works with a speech therapist once a week but we have exercises that we do at home too.  He wore it during those exercises as well.

It is recommended that children use the Forbrain for 15 minutes five days a week.  Most of the review period he used it for 10-15 minutes a day each day we did school.  We do school four to five days a week generally though I did have a baby at the end of May and we took two weeks off of school for me to heal and get some strength back.  Even though we weren’t doing school we still tried to remember to have him use the Forbrain so he would continue to make improvement and not go backwards.  After all, he was still doing his speech therapy too!

The other child I had use the Forbrain is 11 years old and has learning disabilities and issues that make it hard for her to focus on things.  She gets easily distracted.  I have had people tell me that I should make her wear earphones without any noise coming through to help her focus, but that doesn’t work for her.  It actually dis-regulates her even more.  I found that having her wear the Forbrain while she’s supposed to be doing her reading aloud really helps her to focus on the words she’s reading and the sounds she’s making.  

She tends to not fully apply herself and doesn’t always sound out and say the words correctly, preferring to guess or simply make something up or skip the word entirely.  I like that the Forbrain really helped her with listening to her voice and realizing wow I don’t sound very confident and I don’t sound like I know what I’m doing.  Her reading aloud has improved since she started using the Forbrain and I’m hoping to branch into other parts of her school with it soon.

Want to hear what other reviewers have to say?  Need to listen to your voice?  Check out the main TOS Crew blog page for all the other awesome reviews!  You can also find Forbrain on facebook, twitter, and linkedin.