Primary Difference Between Off-The-Shelf Hearing Aids & Programmable Hearing Aids
The purpose of this post is to illustrate the primary difference between hearing aids people can purchase without seeing a medical professional and those they can purchase from a hear care professional. The differences in cost are actually very close. People can get roughly comparable pricing and far better performance than they think.
Hearing tests are typically done by testing patients' hearing at a series of frequencies. The frequencies range from low to relatively high. In the rate case that the numbers are important to you, they are the following: 250Hz; 500Hz; 1,000Hz; 2,000Hz; 3,000Hz; 4,000Hz; 6,000Hz & 8,000Hz. Hz stands for hertz.
During a hearing test, patients wear headphones and hold a button. The button is pressed in response to beeps the patient hears. The objective of the test is to determine the threshold of the patient's hearing. These numbers are recorded in a database for record keeping and hearing aid programming, if necessary. Sound is typically measured in decibels. A hearing performance is represented as seen in Fig. 1, below.
Off-the-shelf hearing aids are not programmed to fit patients' hearing tests. Manufacturers that produce said hearing aids either disallow any adjusting of frequencies or if they may offer two channel adjusting covering a range of frequencies they call bass and a range of frequencies they call treble. Either way, it is highly unlikely that this 2-channel set up can match a patient's hearing test.
Off-the-shelf hearing aids are made to sell as inexpensively as possible, and because of this costs are cut in their production. This is the reason they cannot be customized. If a hearing aid is not customized to a patient's hearing test, the patient's hearing or articulation index might even be reduced, which defeats the purpose of the hearing aid to begin with.
Customizable hearing aids made by mainstream manufacturers have many channels in order to match a patient's hearing test very closely. As time goes on and a patient's hearing changes, customizable hearing aids can be adjusted as well.
Basically, the better the hearing aid is programmed to match the curve in figure 1 - the better the patient will hear.
Ethan Castanon, B.S., Applied Math
All Ear Doctors Hearing Aids
