Hearing Aids

In a newspaper ad or on the internet, these gadgets can look similar to real hearing instruments. But they’re not. Modern hearing devices are the result of decades of research into the physiology of hearing loss and its impact on mental health and behavior.

What makes modern hearing instruments worth the investment?

They focus on speech, not sound

You may never think about this, but when you listen to a conversation, your ears are receiving not just what your partner is saying, but all the other sounds in the environment as well: the refrigerator, the birds outside, the air conditioning, the phone ringing in the next room. Your ear can’t tell any of these sounds apart. That step happens inside your brain, which has learned, since you were an infant, to sort through the wall of noise presented by your ear and pick out the subtle cues of speech. Age-related hearing loss degrades these cues, and your brain has to work that much harder to separate speech from noise. Amplifying the wall of noise, as cheap hearing aids do, simply pumps up the volume of a bad signal and distorts it even more. By contrast, advanced sound processing technology amplifies sound selectively so that delicate speech cues are preserved. Your brain hears more natural speech, and so you comprehend more of the conversation with less effort.

Learn more by visiting Oticon's website