Digital technology touches many aspects of our lives, often in ways beyond the imaginations of past decades. Twenty years ago, digital hearing aids were in their infancy, inferior devices to conventional analog hearing aids, but with developing capabilities and an expansive future.
Today, hearing aids are exclusively digital with features that didn’t exist at the turn of the century. Our understanding of the impact of hearing loss and the secondary benefits of assistive devices has grown too. Hearing aids treat conditions beyond just lost hearing.
At Lawrence Otolaryngology Associates, our head and neck experts are acquainted with every aspect of today’s hearing aid technology and the benefits these offer to our patients. Chances are that contemporary devices have treatment applications and functional features that many people don’t realize.
We’ve gathered a few of these together here to raise awareness. You can get the full picture through an appointment with our hearing professionals.
Hearing aids restore the joy of listening to music for many, though in the past, wearers of hearing aids lost out on the benefit if they needed to remove them to use earbuds for discreet listening.
Today, though, most aids have Bluetooth® technology built-in or available as an option. That means you can stream music wirelessly directly to your hearing aids. It’s a custom listening experience like no other for those with impaired hearing.
Bluetooth means more than just music. It’s also the wireless technology that permits answering calls through smart speakers, headphones, and other devices.
Many hearing aid wearers had difficulty adapting older aids to phone technology. Voices could be hard to distinguish because of low audio fidelity associated with induction coils, a primitive mode of wireless connection.
Those who once avoided phone conversations may be astonished with the clarity of a call beamed directly to their hearing aids.
If it seems as though there’s a smartphone app for everything, it’s definitely true for contemporary hearing aids. As well as music and phone calls, you can fine-tune your hearing to match your environment by selecting programs or tweaking parameters directly from your smartphone.
Noisy restaurants are no longer a problem. You can filter out background sounds with remarkable precision.
Tinnitus, phantom sounds often described as ringing or buzzing in your ears, can be a distracting annoyance for anyone with one or more tinnitus sounds.
Wearing hearing aids suppresses the prominence of these spurious noises by gathering more ambient sound. Your brain assigns priorities to the signals coming from your ears. As ambient sounds become recognized, your brain suppresses perception of tinnitus noises.
Lost hearing leads to social withdrawal. When you’re less engaged with the world, you’re at risk of early cognitive decline. Hearing aids restore your ability to function in a busy world, building your confidence in interacting with others, a skill that hearing loss sometimes erodes.
These are but a few of the amazing abilities of today’s hearing aids. Call the most convenient location of Lawrence Otolaryngology Associates to schedule a hearing exam and start the fitting process. We have offices in Lawrence and Ottawa, so book your appointment today.
