Hearing Amplifier or Digital Hearing Aids?
-->Hearing amplifier or digital hearing aids are becoming a reality for more and more people especially as the baby boom generation ages. One huge problem remains, the cost of hearing aids is not covered by health insurance and so the hard of hearing patient is left to pay the bill on such devices. The problem gets even worse when digital aids come into play. Digital aids contain the latest technology and can push the price tag up thousands of dollars. This leaves the aging generation wondering why these hearing devices are so expensive.
First let’s take a look at how the human ear functions. The human ear has two basic functions. It is responsible for amplifying sound. A person cupping their ear to hear something is simply over exaggerating what the ear already does. And of course the ear is responsible for delivering the sounds to the brain.
There are several kinds of hearing loss. Conductive hearing loss is when a person looses the volume of sound. Hearing aids or digital hearing aids are great for helping with this kind of hearing loss. Hearing aids are not your only option with this however. Doctors are also able to get good results by treating hearing loss with new surgeries. There are even new drugs available that have shown remarkable results.
Inner ear hearing loss, which is caused by the deterioration of the nerve in the ear, is the most common form of hearing loss associated with old age. This affects how the ear processes sounds. Digital hearing aids can help but are not a perfect fix by any means.
Hearing aids used to big bulky and a very unattractive. Not only were they not astatically pleasing but they also did not work very well. The most common complaint was about loud annoying feedback. In the last ten years digital aids have made big improvements to the hearing aid. Digital aids are basically programmable hearing hearing aids that can provide a very custom replication of sounds. Digital aids also have greatly improved on the problem of buzzing feedback that users had complained about for years.
Digital hearing aids were hailed as the fix all for those suffering from hearing loss. There is no question that the new hearing devices are much smaller and are packed full of the latest digital circuits and microprocessors. There is also no question that the new technologies have tacked on thousands more dollars to the already very over priced hearing devices. People are used to having the latest and greatest when it comes to technology and everyone just assumes that just because it’s made with cutting edge technology that it will work the best for them.
It is no secret that hearing amplifiers cost big money. Years back hearing aids were sold by door-to-door sales men, which gave way to big time abuse. Today hearing aids can only be sold by licensed doctors but the top-down sales structure still leaves people suffering from hearing loss vulnerable to being over sold. Digital aids are big business with millions of dollars being spent each year on marketing these new devices.
Digital hearing aids turn everyday sounds into a digital format, which boils down to zeros and ones. Then a microcomputer processes the sounds and relays them to the wearer according to how the hearing device has been programmed. The technology is very much like adjusting a fancy sound system with an equalizer. The end result is that the digital aid relays the sounds according to how loud the background environment is. So if it’s a quite room then the digital aid relays the sound much quieter than it would if you were in a crowed courtyard with lots of background noise.
Studies show that people seem to be more satisfied with digital aids compared to the older analog style of hearing device. A non-profit organization found that 77 percent of those people using digital aids were satisfied with the hearing aid. This is higher than the 66 percent ration of people satisfied with the analog hearing aids. It is not surprising then that almost 50 percent of hearing devices sold today are of the digital aid variety.
Although people seem to be happier with the digital aid, there is a huge price to pay. All the bells and whistles can tack on thousands of dollars, which is not covered by most health insurance companies. In fact, most insurance companies will only pay a few hundred dollars towards the cost of the hearing device. There is a movement is some states however that would require insurance companies to pay up to 85 percent of the cost.
For those people with a small pocket book, the cheaper analog options will not be as available in years to come as the hearing aid manufactures switch over to digital aid models. The programmable hearing aids are cheaper for them to manufacture and also are easier to repair. The good news is that these same companies are starting to introduce a low cost hearing amplifier product line.
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[...] Digital Aids; Are they worth the price? [...]
[...] research today and found out that digital hearing aids or digital aids are very expensive. I found digital aids for as much as 8,000 dollars. This just seems ridiculous. Now there are analog hearing aids but I [...]
I am having troulbe with selecting digital hearing aids. Have to different brand to choose from. One is Audina and the other is Uniiron. Audina has 12 bands and the other has four, I was told first time, now I was told it has eight. The cost is the same. Do you know of these two brands?