What are the Best Hearing Aid Features?

Modern hearing aids pack an enormous amount of technology into an astonishingly compact space. In-the-ear devices are often smaller than a fingernail, yet house a fantastic array of technologies to improve the hearing experience.

But what are the best hearing aid features? Let’s take a look.

Zoom-control

Zoom-control is a relatively new feature on assistive hearing devices. It enables the user to literally “zoom in” on sounds coming from different directions. Zoom features are particularly helpful when you can’t face the source of the sound that you’re trying to listen to.

Synchronization

The human ear and auditory cortex is a fabulously sophisticated piece of biochemical machinery. Not only can it detect an impressive array of sounds, but it can also tell the direction from which they come. Our ears can do this because sound arrives at them at slightly different times. The shape of our ears also alters the sound waves very slightly, depending on which direction it comes from. The combination of these features gives us directional hearing.

Hearing aids don’t usually come with this capability. But some new models feature a type of synchronization that allows one hearing aid to speak to another using Bluetooth. This communication can modulate amplification based on what the other aid detects, providing a kind of simulated directional hearing.

Automatic environmental sensing

Old hearing aids were static devices. They were calibrated by a hearing health professional and then the user kept those settings for the life of the device (or until their hearing loss progressed). But people need their hearing aids to react dynamically to a variety of settings.

Some modern hearing aids can do just this. They use special software to detect the sound environment, and then change settings accordingly, without any input from the wearer. Environmental sensing is an excellent technology for people who regularly transition from one sound environment to another, for instance, as part of their work.

Water-resistance

Many of today’s top mobile phone device manufacturers have started included water-resistance technologies on their devices. So too have the makers of assistive hearing devices. Water-resistant hearing aids can resist sweat and rain, but they are not truly waterproof.

Wind-cancelling technology

The microphones on old hearing aids picked up wind noise, amplified it, and fed it to the wearer,  ruining their experience. Today, though, hearing aids use similar wind-canceling technology to mobile phones, cutting out extraneous wind noise and allowing the wearer to focus exclusively on the critical sounds in their environment.

Tinnitus-management

Tinnitus is a condition which often accompanies hearing loss. Tinnitus can take the form of a persistent ringing, crackling, rattling or whistling noise in the ears, and can cause significant distress to sufferers.

The good news, though, is that some hearing aids come with features which help to suppress the condition. Hearing aids can be calibrated to emit a kind of white noise which interferes with the sound created by tinnitus. The white noise helps to take the edge of tinnitus, allowing many sufferers to get on with their lives and experience less distress as a result of the condition.