How Hearing Aids Work

Have you ever had difficulty hearing in a congested room or restaurant but can hear just fine at home? Do you have particular difficulty hearing higher-pitched voices or TV dialogue?

If yes, you may have hearing loss, and hearing aids might be able to help you.

But how do hearing aids work exactly? Are they basic amplifiers, or something more elaborate?

This week we’ll be evaluating how hearing aids work and how they are a great deal more advanced than many people realize. But first, let’s begin with how normal hearing works.

How Normal Hearing Works

The hearing process starts out with sound. Sound is simply a kind of energy that travels in waves, like ripples in a pond. Things generate sound in the environment when they cause vibrations in the air, and those vibrations are ultimately captured and sent to the ear canal by the outer ear.

Just after passing through the ear canal, the sound vibrations hit the eardrum. The eardrum then vibrates, amplifying the original signal which is then transferred by the middle ear bones to the snail-shaped organ of the middle ear named the cochlea.

The cochlea is full of fluid and very small nerve cells called cilia. The vibrations sent from the middle ear bones agitate the fluid and stimulate the cilia. The cilia then transmit electrical signals to the brain and the brain interprets the signals as sound.

With the majority of instances of noise-induced hearing loss, there is damage to the cilia. Consequently, the inbound signal to the brain is weaker and sounds seem quieter or muffled. But not all frequencies are uniformly impaired. Commonly, the higher-pitched sounds, including speech, are affected to a greater degree.

In a loud setting, like a restaurant, your ability to hear speech is weakened because your brain is receiving a compromised signal for high-frequency sounds. On top of that, background noise, which is low-frequency, is getting through normally, drowning out the speech.

How Hearing Aids Can Help

You can see that the solution is not merely amplifying all sound. If you were to do this, you’d just continue to drown out speech as the background noise grows to be louder relative to the speech sounds.

The solution is selective amplification of only the frequencies you have difficulty hearing. And that is only achievable by having your hearing professionally evaluated and your hearing aids professionally programmed to enhance these specific frequencies.

How Hearing Aids Selectively Amplify Sound

Modern day hearing aids consist of five internal parts: the microphone, amplifier, speaker, battery, and computer chip. But hearing aids are not just straightforward amplifiers—they’re sophisticated electronic devices that alter the properties of sound.

This occurs via the computer chip. Everyone’s hearing is unique, like a fingerprint, and so the frequencies you need amplified will differ. The extraordinary part is, those frequencies can be ascertained precisely with a professional hearing test, known as an audiogram.

Once your hearing professional has these numbers, your hearing aid can be custom-programmed to amplify the frequencies you have the most difficulty with, maximizing speech recognition in the process.

Here’s how it works: the hearing aid receives sound in the environment with the microphone and transfers the sound to the computer chip. The computer chip then converts the sound into digital information so that it can distinguish between assorted frequencies.

Then, dependent on the programmed settings, the high-frequency sounds are enhanced, the low-frequency background sounds are repressed, and the refined sound is presented to your ear via the speaker.

So will your hearing return completely to normal?

While your hearing will not totally go back to normal, that shouldn’t stop you from accomplishing substantial gains in your hearing. For nearly all people, the amplification delivered is all they need to comprehend speech and participate in effective and effortless communication.

Think of it this way. If your eye doctor told you they could improve your vision from 20/80 to 20/25, would you go without prescription glasses because you couldn’t get to 20/20? Absolutely not; you’d be able to function perfectly with 20/25 vision and the gain from 20/80 would be substantial.

Are you set to find out the improvements you can attain with contemporary hearing aids? Call us today!