COVID-19 and Hearing Health

 During this challenging time we're in, hearing health is also experiencing difficulty with muffled voices behind mask wearing.

It seems like every business and health issue is under new restrictions since the Coronaviris hit us this year. 2020 has become the most difficult year for people who have a hard time hearing conversations - especially in noise.

Hearing Health has been hit harder than most other ailments since people are wearing masks which muffles their voice; this makes hearing loss patients struggle since most of their hearing aids were not programmed for muffled voices behind masks.

Since this is a problem with so many patients, we have implemented plans to give a little more boost in the voice range to offset this new hearing challenge. Of course it must be noted how low-level hearing aids (usually costing $3,000.00 or less) cannot handle our custom "voice boost" since they are not capable of advanced programming for this new problem.

But all the mid-level to top-of-the-line hearing aids have much better features (you still get what you pay for) to handle voice boosting for extra muffled sound behind the masks. This goes for social distancing too since it's obvious how a distant voice is harder to hear than a close up conversation.

In our office, we have designed this approach to be permanent or temporary since no one knows when this virus will subside enough to eliminate this new hearing challenge. Our custom programming software is designed to save every programming appointment so we can go back in time to upload a patient's former settings or even set it to something in between. So we can go back to pre-COVID programming at any time.

Feel free to call us if you'd like to set an appointment for this great remedy to today's muffled voice problem. If you have purchased your hearing aids from us directly, there is no charge for this custom service.

Hearing Better in Noise Lately?

Since most people had still struggled to understand speech in noise, we went to Florida (and soon to Las Vegas) to learn more about new technology to hear better in noise:

While we're not "Vegas people" per say, or normally gravitate to the heat in Florida, one of the perks of owning a professional medical office is having our Hearing Aid manufacturers regularly send us all over the country (all expenses paid) to learn about the latest and greatest in Hearing Aid Technologies.

We recently enjoyed a 5-Star resort in Florida and a great side-trip-tour to the Everglades. Our next destination is Las Vegas for Sept/2019. (Of course we can't resist a show to see The Blue Man Group since were already there).

On this next trip (after a nice swim at the resort pool) we will be focusing on the advances of rechargeable Hearing Aids and new exciting developments on Hearing better in noise, which has been an ongoing struggle with many hearing loss patients.

Recently, hearing aids have finally become better at separating noise from speech in busy restaurants etc. Previous hearing aids have had some level of noise reduction, but not enough intelligent noise reduction without impairing the sound of the person talking with you, while in those environments. Thus, they did take down a little noise, but they also made the person speaking with you sound a bit muddy; like they were under water.

The key to noise reduction (and this takes incredible processing) is to reduce noise without reducing the person's voice who's speaking with you.

As mentioned earlier, most hearing aids have not been doing a good job at this demanding task; the top manufacturers like ReSound have been getting our past concerns, and thus spending millions on figuring out just how to make a hearing aid so smart, that is "knows" the difference between noise and the human voice. And not just a any human voice, but the voice that is speaking with you.

It's very difficult for a Hearing Aid processor to actually take out the distant human voices of those who are not speaking with you, while retaining the voice of those who are talking with you. After all, those distant voices are a large part of the noise that's hindering your understanding of speech.

One of the many things that impressed me as a professional audio engineer of 35 years, was this new ability of the ReSound Linx Quattro series to record the actual noise environment that you enter, analyze it, and then reduce it so you can understand the companions who are speaking to you.

So this new advancement is not just analyzing any noise, but the actual noise you are presently in. This is huge since environmental noise can vary from one place to another. So thanks to this modern technique, you can now have the actual noise you would had been struggling with be reduced as you enter into it; and at the same time, have your companion's voice enhanced for ease of understanding their words.

So when you hear of someone complaining that their hearing aids amplify all the noise and voices together (making it very hard to understand words) now you can tell them there is new technology that has transformed the way people comprehend speech in noisy areas.

This new "wow" factor has taken our hearing aids to a whole new level of listening enjoyment and speech understanding...

We look forward to the next learning experience as part of our commitment to help people hear better in noise!