There are several newer hearing aids (look for a review of several that is in the works right now and will be published here soon) that are offering some significant improvement for people with severe S/N loss.  One of the aids in the review is a Phonak unit.  There is also a unit from Oticon and one from Starkey.  Our rough data would suggest that while all these units have a special feature that shifts speech signals out of regions where the patient has little or no hearing and moves the information into areas where there is more hearing; the Starkey with Spectral IQ seems to do the best job.  This is a feature on the new X Series from Starkey and your hearing professional should be getting up to speed on it soon. Almost everybody in the industry is familiar with the older systems used by Phonak and Oticon, but the new Starkey aid will require that the professional do some study to be fully proficient. The important things to look for when researching a hearing aid for someone who is severely impaired are:

1.  A top quality feedback elimination system.  The better the feedback elimination, the more power and more clarity a unit is capable of.

2. Wide frequency band width.  The wider the frequency band of the unit, the better the professional can “tune” the unit to the patients needs and the better they can focus on areas of the greatest loss.

3. Background noise filtering systems. Even the cheapest hearing aids have and can claim a background noise reduction system.  The key is whether that is a drop off system or a filter system.  A drop off system simply takes lower frequency sounds and reduces the gain in that region.  That offers a great “WOW” effect, but does little for speech in noise.  A true filter system will “read the noise” and then construct an ever changing dynamic filter to reduce the noise in the speech circle. Your hearing professional should be able to do a HINT (Hearing In Noise Test) to show a difference between different models.  Starkey has an Ipad app that demonstrates it for the patient, some of the other companies should have something similar.