5 Considerations Before You Buy Hearing Aids

Hearing aid technology continues to advance at a pace second only to the technology that fuels modern space exploration. Within the last three decades, hearing aid circuits have gone from making 3 judgments per second to 300 million judgments per second! This faster processing speed enables the audiologist to simultaneously raise the volume for speech and lower the volume for noise, amplify the telephone, and selectively reduce sound from the sides and behind you. With all the different styles and features of modern hearing aids, how do you select the device that will best accommodate your particular degree of hearing loss? What should you know before your purchase hearing aids?

We believe there are 5 major considerations an individual must make before buying hearing instruments. The first consideration is how well you understand speech in noisy environments.

• The severity of the hearing loss is not a predictor of how much difficulty you may have while trying to hear in a noisy restaurant, in an outboard motorboat, etc.
• Individuals with normal hearing typically can hear even if the background noise is as loud or slightly louder than the target speech. 
• For people who have a sensorineural hearing loss, the optimal ratio between the loudness of the speech and the loudness of the background noise changes. It is far more difficult to hear in noise with a sensorineural hearing loss.
• A normal ratio is 0-4 dB (speech is as loud or 4 dB louder than the noise). You can hear even at Cracker Barrell!
• An abnormal ratio is greater than 4 dB. Unfortunately, the ratio for individuals with sensorineural hearing loss can be greater than 15 dB (meaning, if the speech is 15 dB louder than the noise, you can hear with clarity).
• Some people with a sensorineural hearing loss require a ratio of 10 dB , others may need only 6 dB, etc. This should be part of the hearing evalatuion and reviewed prior to selecting hearing aid circuits, since all hearing aid circuits vary in the speech to noise ratio improvement.

The takeaway message is: many hearing aids work okay in quiet rooms but do not effectively improve hearing in noisy rooms. Multi-microphone technology, increased number of channels, very fast processing speed all contribute to improved speech understanding in noise.

No matter how skilled the audiologist is in programming the hearing aid, the circuit should be matched to the needs of the user or improved hearing in noise cannot occur.

For more information on what you should consider before purchasing hearing aids, click here.