Understanding Hearing Aid Features

Modern hearing aids are more than simple devices that amplify incoming sounds. They also offer a host of additional features, designed to improve the experience of the user. 

All types of hearing aids offer additional perks, besides their size or shape, that improve your quality of life. But what are they? And why do they matter? We’ll run through some of the top hearing aid features available, and why you might want them on your assistive hearing device. 

Channels

While hearing aids can increase the volume of all incoming sounds uniformly, the best slice up the degree of amplification depending on pitch. The reason they do this is to accommodate the fact that most patients’ hearing profile is lumpy. They can hear sounds in some parts of the frequency spectrum well and others poorly. 

The number of channels a hearing aid has refers to how many times it slices up the frequency spectrum. So, if a hearing aid has six channels, that means it provides six frequency bands you can adjust independently to get the amplification profile that best matches your hearing loss. 

Please note that more channels aren’t necessarily better unless your hearing loss is extremely frequency dependent.

Directional microphones

Directional microphones are one of the biggest hearing aid innovations to hit the market in recent years. This feature is ideal for helping you focus on a single conversation in an otherwise loud room. Instead of boosting all sounds, directional hearing aids only amplify incoming sounds in the direction you’re facing, making it easier to listen to specific conversations. 

Wind suppression

In the past, live TV broadcasters would struggle to get themselves heard, thanks to the noise of the wind rattling their microphones. Fast-moving air would create annoying and extremely loud white noise that drowned out everything else. TV crews improved their technology to deal with this problem, but until recently, it was a phenomenon that continued to affect hearing aid users. 

In recent years, though, manufacturers improved their products and now, many assistive hearing devices feature software that cancels out unwanted wind noise, allowing you to focus on the sounds that matter. 

The result? You can now stand on a windswept moor without needing to cover your ears. 

Feedback suppression

It’s a similar story when it comes to feedback suppression. In the past, some hearing aid microphones would pick up sounds from the speaker unit, creating an annoying feedback loop. Now, though, most manufacturers include chips in their devices that monitor for feedback signals and interrupt them before you detect them. If your unit senses a problem, it’ll create an equal and opposite signal, canceling out the noise in a fraction of a second. 

Wireless connectivity

Sometimes hearing aid users want to connect their devices to other electronics in the home. For instance, you might consider hooking up your assistive hearing device to your TV and pumping sounds directly to the speaker, bypassing the microphone. For this reason, many hearing aids now come with wireless connectivity, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, letting you use them like regular wireless earbuds. 

The hearing aid features you choose depend on your needs and is something you should discuss with your audiologist.