High-Tech Tools for Hearing Loss

Technology has done a wonderful job of changing the lives of people with hearing loss. There are tons of devices out there for people who have hearing loss, including hearing aids and cochlear implants. There's also assistive listening devices. Technology is much easier than it used to be to wear. Hearing aids have advanced a lot over the years, not only in the appearance, but especially the electronics inside and what they do to help you hear better. And when digital took over, we were really able to do lots of manipulation to the sound in order to really tailor-make the devices for an individual's hearing loss, even if that meant that you were hearing differently in each ear. The hearing aids are now designed to automatically detect where the strongest sound is and funnel the sound into your hearing aids to try to magnify and improve how you're understanding speech. We live in a noisy world. You shouldn't have to change where you sit in order to be able to enjoy a conversation. Rechargeable hearing aids allow the users to never have to take a hearing aid battery out of a hearing aid or open them up to turn them off. Sometimes hearing aids are not quite enough, and there's other tools that we can add to it to help make communication easier. A sound amplification device is a device designed to pick up voices or other sounds in the environment and amplify them in a person's ear. A hearing loop is an induction system that is built into a room or in a car that allows the audio to communicate with another induction loop in a person's hearing aid or hearing device. There are signalers that can indicate when someone's at your door. There are amplified fire alarms. Some of those other tools that we have to help us along with hearing aids include having Bluetooth connection with cell phones, with televisions, with any audio device that has Bluetooth capability. It's pretty remarkable the tools we have available to help us hear. The more educated our patients are, the better their journey is to improving their hearing. There's no cause to be scared of what the possibilities are. Give it a try. You'd be quite surprised as to what you'll find on the other end of it. You have one shot at life. Live it to the fullest.