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Breaking down the communication barriers
What’s new in Hearing Aids
By Megan Nightingale, M.S., Audiologist,
President, Peninsula Hearing Inc. |
Hearing Aids just keep getting better and better. Five years have passed since the introduction of digital hearing aids to the market. When first introduced, they were touted as being the device that would enable every hearing impaired person to reach their full hearing potential! While certainly an improvement over conventional hearing aids, they were not without problems and they were, in a word, expensive.
The manufacturers of those first digital hearing aids have never tired in their quest to improve their products based on now five years of feedback from hearing aid wearers. Also, with the expansion of many manufacturers into the digital hearing aid market, the retail costs have come down on many digital models.
Let’s look at improvements. Digital hearing aids have as their hallmark the ability to amplify different sounds differently. For example, the majority of hearing impaired individuals have a loss of hearing for soft sounds, which makes it hard to hear consonant sounds, the sounds most needed for speech understanding. Digital aids have the ability to amplify the soft sounds to a great degree and leave loud sounds untouched. All that amplification of soft sounds however meant that the first digital aids were prone to feedback problems. Feedback is the whistling one might hear if someone’s hearing aid is turned up too loud. The early digitals could eliminate feedback, but at the cost of the amplification for soft sounds.
Today’s digital hearing aids now incorporate advanced feedback detection and elimination strategies that get rid of the whistling without sacrificing any of the amplification needed for soft sounds. The manufacturers have also learned a great deal about what does and does not work for speech understanding in noise and have built much better hearing aids to deal with this most difficult issue.
Most major manufacturers of hearing aids now make a digital product. Some are better than others. The advantage of having so many digital hearing aids to choose from however is the price range. There are digital hearing aids now that are priced at what a good conventional hearing aid usually costs. The other new introduction to the hearing aid market is that of leasing. A top of the line digital hearing aid can be within the reach of most people for a reasonable monthly payment and two, three or four years later, one can hand them back in for completely new ones. |
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