The “Next Evolution” in Hearing Aid Dispensing

When Digital Hearing Aids were first introduced in the mid 1990’s, it was widely believed and promoted that a new dawn in speech understanding had been achieved for the hearing impaired. But that lofty goal remained elusive. Hearing aid dispensers and audiologists from around the country quickly realized that there was more to hearing aid satisfaction than just precisely applied amplification. The same problems of occlusion, feedback, loudness sensitivity, and an inability to understand speech, particularly in noisy environments, were still prevalent.

In 2016, hearing aid companies began to introduce new, faster computer chips that more than doubled the processing speed (up to 500 million calculations/second). These faster computer chips resulted in the ability to sufficiently employ all the features simultaneously and dramatically improve most patients’ ability to understand speech in noisy situations.

In other words, hearing aids have just started to deliver on the promises from long ago!