The human brain has an incredible ability to detect the meaning of speech within many different sounds, filtering out any unnecessary noise in the background. Hearing loss reduces this ability – our ‘central auditory processing’ – making everyday life extremely tiring.
Our state-of-the-art hearing aids mimic this ability by connecting your two ears and making them work together. This helps to reduce unwanted noise and retain important speech without you having to strain yourself to hear. This allows you to concentrate on more important things like memory or forming a reply.
This feature is a more sophisticated version of directional microphones. It allows your device to alter its sensitivity and focus depending on your environment, effectively reducing background noise whether you’re in a small group or a large crowd. Even moving sounds such as cars passing by can be reduced. This feature helps to maximise the sounds and speech you want to hear while blocking out what you don’t.
This advanced feature provides significant advantages in difficult listening environments.
For people with good low-frequency hearing, there may be an initial awareness of your own speech when you start using a hearing aid. This is caused by vibrations in the cartilaginous portion of the ear canal from sounds conducted through the jaw. This sensation usually fades fairly quickly for most people, however, there is a solution in the meantime.
The open fit hearing system is a miniature behind-the-ear style of hearing instrument that helps to eliminate the awareness of one’s own voice. The instrument is connected to the ear canal by a very fine diameter capillary tube that renders it near invisible to the naked eye. A small soft dome holds the capillary tube in the canal and the fine structure of the dome renders it acoustically transparent.
The open fit systems are nearly always used in conjunction with feedback cancellation systems, which have helped the emergence of this type of technology into everyday practice.