The Catholic University of Lille has adopted Sennheiser MobileConnect assisted listening technology for all amphitheatres and classrooms intended to accommodate more than 50 people. The decisive criteria for the choice included ease-of-use, the audio quality and the ergonomics of its dedicated application.
Twenty MobileConnect stations are located in a server room and accommodate several of the campus buildings.
The French university’s Programmed Accessibility Agenda required a contemporary approach to assisted listening. The specifications called for user friendliness as well as being hygienic and easily scalable for a central hardware solution. Using a Bring-Your-Own-Device model, an audio stream is sent directly to students’ personal smartphones, making it readily accessible and intuitive to use. People with hearing loss do not have to ask for a specific receiver device and can settle anywhere the faculty’s Wi-Fi is available. Sudents wearing hearing aids, cochlear implants or headphones can comfortably follow the lectures, with barely noticeable latency.
‘MobileConnect offers us great flexibility because it not only enables assisted listening, but also allows for live translation and audio retransmission in other rooms with Dante,’ says Multimedia Project Manager, Aurélien Trancart. ‘This flexibility is important for us as an educational institution.’
‘The users of the solution are fully autonomous,’ adds Vianney Delory, also a Multimedia Manager at the Faculties of the Catholic University of Lille. ‘Students who have a hearing implant or have any disability they don’t want to show can scan the QR code at the entrance. This is an undeniable advantage over assisted listening via induction loops where users must sit in the front rows. With MobileConnect, they can place themselves wherever they want in the room.’
A further asset of MobileConnect for the lies in its hygienic dimension. As students use their own smartphones to access the audio stream, there is no need to distribute and clean rental devices for assisted listening, which minimises health risks.
The team of Faculties of the Catholic University of Lille is satisfied with this assisted listening equipment and its collaboration with Sennheiser: ‘The new configuration met exactly our expectations,’ Trancart says. ‘The cooperation with the Sennheiser team is excellent. We have very good support and we get quick and efficient answers in case of problems or questions.’
