If you have hearing aids, you want to ensure they can help you hear in all listening environments. After all, throughout the day, you are exposed to varying degrees of sound, from enjoying a quiet breakfast at home to dinner with friends at a busy restaurant like Fedeli’s Steak & Pasta.
Let’s examine how hearing aids can help improve your listening experience, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.
Conversations in Noisy Environments
Human beings are social creatures. We like to spend a lot of our time in conversations with others. In a study examining different listening environments, researchers found that hearing aid users spent an average of 57% of their time in conversation, regardless of age.
Because conversation is such a big part of our everyday life, hearing aid users need to make sure their devices can help them connect with others whenever they go, including in noisy environments. To that end, features like direction microphones, wireless capabilities and noise reduction settings on hearing aids can be extremely helpful.
Communicating With Others Through Technology
We don’t just connect with others in person but during video meetings and phone calls as well. Hearing loss can make these types of communication more difficult to understand. However, if you have hearing aids with Bluetooth™ capabilities, they can double as earbuds and you can stream audio from your smartphone or laptop directly into your ears.
This provides improved sound quality and gives you the ability to take calls or meetings from pretty much anywhere while feeling confident in your ability to communicate.
Listening to Music
Listening to music is different from listening to regular speech because it often combines sounds of very different frequencies all at once. If you are a music lover, ask your audiologist about creating a specific setting on your hearing aid to be used when you listen to your favorite songs. You also want to make sure your hearing aid has a large bandwidth so that you can enjoy the fullness of sound music has to offer.
Enjoying the Great Outdoors
If you’re a nature lover, you likely enjoy being able to appreciate sounds like birds chirping and the babbling stream. In that case, it may be wise to consider hearing aids that have programs designed to reduce wind resistance and improve your hearing outdoors.
If you have additional questions about what hearing aids can do for you or wish to schedule an appointment with one of our experts, call Topeka ENT today.