I can’t understand what people are saying with all the noise. I don’t have fun at family gatherings anymore because everything is too loud. I can’t understand the waiter or waitress You may feel frustrated or isolated even though you are surrounded by family or friends. You may think you’re the only one having difficulty. You may feel embarrassed over misunderstandings or at needing to ask people to repeat. You may feel stressed and tired from straining to hear.
The most basic solutions for hearing aids to help you hear in noise include the following. Do your hearing aids incorporate these features?
Directionality: Hearing aids with directional microphones These hearing aids will help in a noisy restaurant because they will focus toward the person speaking and not on the noise of the crowd.
Digital Noise management systems This type of system will help by attempting to identify the noise and then minimize or muffle it slightly. There are two basic types of noise: general ambient noise and speech noise. It will work best on ambient noise.
Digital Speech Enhancing systems This type of system will help by identifying speech and optimizing the speech signal in the presence of background noise.
You may already be aware that while technology has come a long way recently, hearing aids are only part of the solution. Hearing aids can help you hear a lot of the speech and other sounds you’ve been missing.
Often people believe that hearing aids only amplify speech and cut out other sounds in their environment. This is not true. It is important for you to hear environmental sounds as well as speech. Because you have not been hearing all the components of the sounds of speech or of the sounds in your environment for quite awhile, your brain will need to adjust to these sounds again.
In addition to hearing aids, some approaches we use to help people hear better in noise are aural rehabilitation or auditory training. In some cases FM systems are needed to help in noisy environments. Depending on your goals there are several auditory training programs we can recommend to help you hear better or listen better in noise. Auditory training can be like physical therapy for your ears and aural rehabilitation also incorporates suggestions for improving communication.
We will work together with you toward your individual hearing goals to figure out how to best manage your hearing loss.
We will work with you for real life solutions instead of merely recommending appropriate technology.
To help a person with hearing loss communicate well we need to consider the person speaking, the person listening, the environment, the technology used for the listener (hearing aids or FM system) and practice or training with both the technology and difficult environments.
