People who have hearing loss and use hearing aids to supplement their hearing need to be aware of the changes that have come to hearing aids. While you may have been able to easily program your own hearing aid in the past, the modern hearing aids require that you go to a hearing specialist in order to get the most out of your hearing device. Since each person is unique in their abilities with hearing, it is crucial to understand that a hearing aid needs to have specific input based on your hearing tests to function best. Let’s look at how hearing aids are programmed and see how the process can help you.

What Factors Can Be Adjusted?

There are significant amounts of aspects of hearing aids that can be changed by simply going to an audiologist and having them determine your best prospects for hearing. While volume is thought to be the most common means of improving one’s hearing, there are several other things that people wish to change to elicit a better outcome. Some of these aspects are frequency, compression value, and noise reduction is simpler to change than others, but they can still have a profound impact.

Processing Time

Have you ever had a hearing aid right off of the shelf? They are not able to meet the specific needs of you as an individual because of the factory settings. However, in the modern age we are able to program the hearing aids to meet over a hundred different standards for hearing health. You cannot program these devices on your own, however, because they need the specialist hands of an audiologist. To have the hearing aid programmed for you, you need to have a series of tests run on your hearing so that all of your unique information can be included within the device. There are many different benefits to going through this processed such as more specific hearing, but it can be rather long. You essentially trouble shoot your hearing abilities in the presence of a doctor, which can take time, but is ultimately worth it.

Programming Hearing Aids

For those individuals that suffer from hearing loss, there are many ways that your hearing specialist can help you through the programming process. Real-ear probes can determine the types of sound that are able to penetrate your device and go through your ear canal. Used in conjunction with a form of visual mapping for your brain, the hearing aid can be programmed to focus on the areas in your brain processing that experience the most deficiency. Another area of hearing health that people worry about is whether or not it will work for them when they have to compete with outside noises. After all, a hearing aid may work perfectly find in the doctor’s office, but may need some minor adjustments to work well outside of that. That is why they use a surround sound system that is built to help people with hearing loss identify the best way to go about programming the device for use in multiple settings.