Hearing aids?

Every time the "Turn up the things you love" advert comes on TV, my wife nudges me that I should go and find out about these hearing aids.

The way that they are portrayed in the ad seems almost miraculous; the background noise and chatter is muted and the wearer can hear what they want to, whether that's birds singing softly or their friends / partner talking quietly to them in a crowded pub.

The engineer in me tells me that, whilst some psycho-acoustics based audio processing could help, you'd really need a pretty huge reflector-based microphone aimed at your chosen sound source to duplicate the effects advertised.

Does anyone have any experience with these hearing aids? Can they help with our audio processing issues? I thought (and this seems confirmed by the fact that these ads are targeted at the general population) that these hearing aids were designed to combat age-related hearing loss (which, last time I checked, I don't have except for the normal loss of frequencies above about 13kHz).

Parents
  • Modern hearing aids are programmable, which allows a couple of different things:

    - they can be programmed to boost the specific frequencies in which someone has hearing loss, rather than just boosting all noise

    - they can be programmed to boost frequencies associated with speech rather than ancillary noises

    - they can be actually be programmed to boost a dominant voice above other voices, and/or a voice coming from the direction a person is facing

    All of this is rather good and very useful for anybody with hearing loss.

    However: My experience is that they still struggle with helping to pick out one voice over another, and to pick out voices over background noise (especially something like a pub).

    (Mine also cause irritation to the inside of my ears causing fluid of some form to lubricate the ear canal, making the hearing aid itself slippery but also just being darned unpleasant)

Reply
  • Modern hearing aids are programmable, which allows a couple of different things:

    - they can be programmed to boost the specific frequencies in which someone has hearing loss, rather than just boosting all noise

    - they can be programmed to boost frequencies associated with speech rather than ancillary noises

    - they can be actually be programmed to boost a dominant voice above other voices, and/or a voice coming from the direction a person is facing

    All of this is rather good and very useful for anybody with hearing loss.

    However: My experience is that they still struggle with helping to pick out one voice over another, and to pick out voices over background noise (especially something like a pub).

    (Mine also cause irritation to the inside of my ears causing fluid of some form to lubricate the ear canal, making the hearing aid itself slippery but also just being darned unpleasant)

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