We have all heard and are familiar with the term “smart phone” so, what is a “smart hearing aid” and what is it about them, that makes them so smart?

 

 

These days it seems like everywhere you look, ordinary devices are becoming smart: phones, TVs, even your toothbrush. Smart devices are easy and intuitive to use, anticipate your needs and desires, interact with you, and connect and work with your other consumer electronics. As something you wear and use all day long, hearing aids should be smart, too. So, what makes hearing aids smart?

 

Working together as a pair

Hearing doesn’t occur just in your ears,  it occurs in your brain. When we hear, our brain takes sensory input from both ears to make sense of what our ears pick up. When fit as a pair, smart hearing aids are able to exchange information picked up individually, and make processing and executive decisions together, the result reminding natural hearing processes.

 

Being aware of the environment

Smart technology is aware of the environment so it can optimize performance accordingly. For smart hearing aids, that means they know what kind of listening situation you’re in. Your listening needs will be different depending on your environment. Smart hearing aids can accurately and quickly differentiate many different and distinct acoustic environments, including speech, noise, music, or car for example and optimize their performance as needed.

 

Automatically adapting to your listening needs

Having analyzed the listening environment together, smart hearing aids make processing decisions and automatically adapt to provide the best listening experience for you in that situation. For example, at a noisy family gathering, they automatically focus on the person talking in front of you while reducing speech and noise coming from other directions. But if you’re taking your dog to the park, smart hearing aids ensure you enjoy the sounds of nature coming from all directions.

 

Learning how you like to hear

Smart hearing aids also learn from your listening preferences. What sounds too soft to one person may be just right for another. Even for the same person, depending on the listening situation, preferences may vary. For example, you may like to hear more bass when listening to music, but when in a car, you may want the bass sounds to be softer, so that you can understand a conversation better. No hearing aid can fully anticipate every wearer’s listening preferences from day one. What smart hearing aids can do however, is learn your preferences over time, essentially eliminating the need for you to make manual adjustments.

 

Being intuitive and interactive

Smart hearing aids interact with all sorts of consumer electronics, allowing you to stream a phone call without touching your phone, listen to iTunes® or Pandora® radio, or watch a movie from your TV or tablet. They can also be controlled easily and discreetly via free apps on your smartphone.

 

Smart hearing aids are available now

Inspired by the natural hearing process, Siemens smart hearing aids are the only devices to allow hearing impaired wearers to understand speech significantly better in challenging listening situations than even their normal hearing counterparts. That’s been Clinically Proven*.

 

Talk to us at A Atlantic Hearing to learn more about these amazing hearing solutions.

 

*Two independent clinical studies − at the University of Northern Colorado and at the Hearing Center of the University of Oldenburg − have shown that Siemens hearing aids with binaural signal processing make it possible to hear better than people with normal hearing in certain challenging listening situations.

 

Source: Siemens

Image credit: Siemens