Hearing Aids Homepage

Question: How do hearing aids work? and are they being developed?

(Posted by: Lydia B on 2010-05-13 10:16:22)

Obviously nowadays young people listen to loud music for long periods of time (me included) and we are damaging our hearing. when the loud noise damages or kills some of the cells in the ears how do hearing aids work to improve hearing? are scientists developing anything better? in a few years there are going to be so many more people needing hearing aids so how are they doing with new technology/ science on that, do we know? thanks xx

Posted by: Thumbs Up on 2010-05-13, 12:46:36

Hi there, check out this FAQs page on Aidright.com for how hearing aids work: adviceonhearingaids.com/ hearing-aids-products.aspx There is also a good forum on hearing aids and hearing loss you can check out: adviceonhearingaids.com/ forum/ Good luck in your search!

Posted by: ♥ Pixie ♥ on 2010-05-13, 11:42:50

Hearing aids is just king of like a microphone and it makes the normal sound louder really it's quite simple. I don't know if scientists are developing anything better. I think there will be allot more young people needing hearing aids in the future, because when I listen to some of the kids in my class when they are listening to music I wonder how they can here at all.

Posted by: IAN on 2010-05-13, 12:03:56

Hi Lydia Basically hearing aids amplify sound. They do provide some help for those of us with a hearing loss but they can't give you back normal hearing. Mine were adjusted to try an d amplify the frequencies that I have difficulty in hearing mainly from about 2kHz up through the frequencies to 8 kHz. However, when it comes to understanding what people are saying I still have difficulty because of the damage to the tiny hair cells in my inner ears. Damage that was caused by listening to loud music when I was in my teens and twenties, so beware! Hearing aids have changed a lot in recent years and I'm told that they are better now than they used to be and I hope that they will continue to improve. You might want to try searching your question on the internet, I only know what I know from my own experience of hearing loss and now wearing hearing aids Good luck Ian

Posted by: C on 2010-05-15, 06:12:27

Hearing aids are very complicated... they are computers in your ears that make more adjustments per second than your desktop computer. The reason they are complicated is because inner ear damage (the type of hearing loss that requires hearing aids) is complicated. The audiogram is a graph of the softest sounds a person can hear at a number of different pitches in each ear. Hearing aids have channels and bands and those channels are the number of different pieces that it splits your audiogram up into. Digital prescription hearing aids have the person's audiogram in the computer and then prescribes amplification into the computer chip of the hearing aids. They are designed to help the person hear soft sounds softly, speech comfortably, and loud sounds loudly but they have a ceiling on them called the MPO where the hearing aid starts cutting down loud sounds so that they won't cause more hearing loss and so the person won't be uncomfortable. Sounds come into the microphones, the sound is digitized and goes through the computer chip and then the sound is spit out as an analog signal by the receiver to the person's ear. Every year they come out with hearing aids that perform better in background noise since that is a common complaint. Hearing aids can have up to 20 channels and bands or more which sure beats the hearing aids we used to fit some time ago that weren't digital, had one channel and had to be adjusted with screw drivers. The other thing manufacturers have developed are very high powered hearing instruments to help even the most profound of hearing losses.