Digital Hearing Aids Offer Additional Features and Benefits

In the last several years there has been what can easily be characterized as an explosion in the number of different digital hearing aids that are now available on the market. Nowadays, there are over twenty manufacturers who produce digital hearing aid products that are available under no less than 40 different model brand names. There is no doubt that this digital technology is here to stay in the field of assistive listening devices, yet there are still many who question if digital is really better.

There is no question that we live in an era when most things that are digital are considered to be "state-of-the-art." However, not everyone is convinced that digital necessarily equates with better, as seems to be a common assumption among many people. There are many people who claim that digitized hearing aids, while advantageous in many ways, are not necessarily always the best choice for everyone.

There have been digital hearing aids available since the middle part of the 1980s. At that time there were two manufacturers who introduced new technology to hearing aid products by integrating digital signal processing (DSP) into their units. While this was considered to be the true cutting edge in hearing technology, the actual hearing devices were so large and cumbersome that they were not widely accepted.

About a decade later, two different manufacturers of hearing solutions reintroduced digitized hearing aids to the marketplace and this time they were much better received. This is because technology had advanced to the point that the DSP could be integrated into many of the most popular styles of these devices, including the behind the ear and in the ear hearing aids.

Even though these new digital aids were more expensive than their analogue cousins, they still enjoyed almost immediate popularity among hearing healthcare clinicians and also among consumers. This almost instant acceptance and success, combined with a promise of even more advanced signal processing in the future, quickly assured the marketplace that digital hearing aid technology had finally "come of age."

But, the question still lingers for many: is the quality of the sound from digital hearing aids really better than the analogue versions? The answer really lies in the processing abilities that the digital technology provides and from that aspect the answer in a firm yes. The experts say that digital hearing technology is not superior simply because it is digital. The advantage comes from the fact that the DSP give the manufacturers, the clinicians and the end users so many features and options for enhancing sound that analogue devices simply cannot deliver.

A few of the many advantages of digitized hearing aids over the analogue models include such things as: gain processing, which helps to lessen background noise while isolating conversational sounds; digital feedback reduction (DFR), which significantly reduces incidence of annoying, and often painful, feedback from the unit; digital noise reduction, which also helps eliminate background noise; digital speech enhancers; and, directional microphones. All of these features are virtually non-existent in analogue hearing aids.

Most of the experts in the hearing devices industry are in agreement that this is an exciting time in the industry and they expect that digital hearing aids will continue to advance and provide additional breakthroughs. As these improvements continue and benefit more and more people, it is also expected that eventually the analogue hearing aids will be replaced entirely by the digital models.

Technorati Tags: Hearing Aids, Digital Hearing Aids Offer Additional Features and Benefits