Each year, manufacturers spend tens of millions of dollars on research and development to try to deliver a more useful and improved product over the previous year. So how hard can it be? Why can’t they just make hearing aids amplify clearly? Well here is a little insight on some of the obstacles.

Most hearing losses are due to damaged peripheral nerves. The nerve’s ability to respond to its stimulus has not only decreased, but also the signal it passes on to the brain is distorted. One way to image this distortion is to think about how objects look through a wavy 100 year old pane of glass. Even with increased lighting, the view remains distorted.

Another major obstacle to nerve related hearing loss is the decreased volume range of hearing. When we are young and have terrific hearing, most people can hear faint sounds around 5dB or less, and can tolerate loud sounds as much as 100dB or more. With hearing loss, this approximate 100dB volume range is decreased sometimes by a half, a third, or less. In other words, the wearer needs much more volume to hear faint sounds, but they retain the same or sometimes less tolerance for loud sounds. Image a one foot ruler with quarter inch and eighth inch marks. Now imagine if you could squeeze that ruler down to one half or one third of its original length. All of the marks are still present, but they have been squeezed together so that it is harder to tell where one mark begins and the other ends. This is what happens with sound. Hearing aids literally squeeze outside sounds into the usable hearing range of the wearer’s ears. As a result, the wearer can hear better, but there is less distinction between background noise and the louder person talking right in front of them. To the wearer, all sounds begin to sound similar in volume and it can become a little difficult to hearing what they want to over what they don’t. This one reason why catching and treating a hearing loss early is so important.