Here are a few things that improve hearing in noisy environments:
 

Hearing With Both Ears

Your brain compares the signal from both ears and uses the differences to determine from what direction sounds originate and to tune out background noise while you focus on conversation. If you have hearing loss in both ears and choose to wear only one hearing aid, you are essentially only listening through one ear. Without “stereo,”  the brain has difficulty filtering out the interfering noise.

Control Your Environment

Certain acoustics can make hearing in noise even worse. High ceilings and reverberant surfaces such as tile floors make noisy situations difficult even for those with normal hearing. Don’t be shy about controlling your surroundings — ask for a booth in a corner of the restaurant, or pull aside the person you’re straining to hear at a party and duck outside or into a quieter room.

Directional Microphones

We cannot stress enough the importance of this feature on hearing aids. While adding a directional microphone to a hearing aid may increase the cost slightly, it also increases the benefit immeasurably. Given that in most circumstances we face the person we wish to hear, it would be helpful to amplify sounds in front of us without amplifying the noise behind us. Directional microphones do just that.

When a hearing aid has only a single microphone, the microphone picks up sound (regardless of what direction it comes from) and amplifies it according to the prescription. By placing a second microphone on the hearing aid, we can tell from what direction sounds originate. With a directional microphone, one microphone points forward and one points to the rear. Because sounds coming from behind you will be louder when they reach the back microphone and sounds coming from in front of you will be louder when they reach the front microphone, we now have a basis for comparison. The hearing aid uses this information to turn down sounds coming from behind and to accentuate sounds coming from in front, thereby dramatically improving hearing in noise.

Most hearing aids with directional microphones require that you switch between the omni-directional and directional modes. That is, there will usually be a program button or switch that will toggle the hearing aid between a prescription for “in quiet” (when you may want to hear sounds from behind you) and one for noisy environments (when the directional microphone is on so that background noise is reduced but not eliminated). Other hearing aids have automatic directionality, where sounds detected from behind are turned down over the course of a few seconds. We will discuss the specifics of operation for your particular hearing aids.

Steady State Noise Reduction

Some digital hearing aids search for “steady state” noises (e.g. refrigerator hum, fan noise) and turn those down. Because speech is a modulated signal, speech is amplified while the constant hum of your refrigerator is almost completely cancelled. While this feature is very helpful for specific types of noise, it will not help reduce background noise that is not steady state such as the party of people talking behind you in a restaurant.

From our Blog - ... One of Those (Hard of Hearing) Weekends - Have you ever had one of those hours, or days, or weekends when hearing loss seems to play a starring role as the bad guy? ... select for more...

For your convenience, download forms prior to first visit.

Privacy Policy & Terms | Site Map |    © 2008-2013 Copyright. All rights reserved.