Guide to choosing your best hearing aids
The hearing aid world can be very confusing. You might choose to do your research, but with assorted hearing aid manufacturers, product names to different styles and features, this is a complicated task. To make it worse, hearing aids are a very personal thing. A hearing aid that works well for one person may not be suitable for another. Hence, asking friends may give you quite a narrow view of what hearing aids can offer you.
So what are the key things you should look for and consider when buying hearing aids? What questions should you be asking your hearing professional?
1. Style
Hearing aids come in many shapes and styles. The type of hearing aid that is right for you depends on many factors, including comfort, degree of hearing loss, dexterity, or simply a personal taste.
Visible or invisible, the style of hearing aids matters. You are not being vain. You need to choose a hearing aid that you are willing to wear and not leave it in a drawer. However, there may be some restrictions.
Hearing professionals can recommend hearing aids that are aimed to prescribe the best hearing for the clients, which depends on the hearing loss configuration and severity, lifestyle and comfort but there is often a compromise between the preferred style and hearing improvement.
A classic example of this is a client with an unsuitable hearing loss wanting the smallest, invisible hearing aids (Please read our Invisible Hearing Aids Guide ). An excellent clinician would go through the pros and cons of different styles of hearing aids and come to a decision that is the best-suited device with your choice of style in mind.
Some questions to ask:
Is the hearing aid style suitable for my hearing loss?
Can I get something smaller?
What is the battery life on this hearing aid vs another style?
Is hearing aid maintenance different depending on style?
2. Comfort
A hearing aid should be comfortable for you to wear for the majority of your day. Many of our clients wear hearing aids 8 hours or more per day on average.
The amount of usage time relates to many factors:
The physical comfort of the hearing aid in the ear
The comfort of the sound in a variety of situations including your own voice
How much improvement the hearing aid user is noticing in various environment, especially amongst the group and noisy background situations.
Hearing aids should be easy to manage for you. Hearing aids come in all shapes and sizes, and some are very small. You need to be able to keep it clean, put it on your ears and charge the hearing aids or change batteries. It is crucial to address any issues that limit your use during the follow-up appointments after the initial fitting to achieve beneficial use.
3.Functionality
The main job of hearing aids is to optimize speech understanding in quiet and noise.
Quiet
During your hearing test, you may be asked to repeat a set of words to determine your maximum speech understanding in quiet. A well-suited hearing aid should allow you to hear as well as this task in quiet situations. A hearing aid not fitted well can negatively affect the ability to understand speech.
Note- if your measured ability is poor from the speech task, then a conventional hearing aid may not give you a better speech understanding. Use of hearing aid such as CROS or BICROS may provide better support.
Please ask your Audiologist to explain your speech scores.
Noise
Modern hearing aids have directional microphones. Directionality is the ability for your hearing aids to detect and focus the source of speech digitally. Advanced directional microphone system will help you hear more speech in background noise.
Most modern hearing aids have a noise reduction function. Advanced hearing aids can distinguish speech from noise in real-time. The degree to which they help and how they help differs from hearing aid manufacturers and hearing aid technology level.
4. Connectivity/bluetooth
Some hearing aids today can connect to other devices using Bluetooth™ or other streaming technology. You can even adjust some hearing aids using your smartphone (change volume and settings, etc.)
Please ask your Audiologist if your hearing aids can connect directly to the iPhone/Android phone.
5. Rechargeable hearing aids
Limited to certain styles of hearing aids, there now an option of rechargeable hearing aids. There are a few different ways to recharge the hearing aids, (more on hearing aid batteries please click here) but all of them require you to charge them every day. They typically last 20- 30 hours, and this depends on the usage style, such as how much Bluetooth feature the user is using, if it is available; and the degree of hearing loss.