What Makes Digital Hearing Aids Better?

“Digital” is a word that seems to be used to describe anything new in electronics. But, when it comes to hearing aids, is “digital” just a buzz word?

In the days before digital signal processing, hearing aids were essentially little public address systems. They took sound that entered at the microphone, and amplified it so that it would reach the hearing impaired person’s eardrum at a louder level. Without digital signal processing, that’s about all you can do with sound. But, with digital processing hearing aids now have little computers that analyze many different aspects of incoming sound, and make modifications to that sound to increase the likelihood that the hearing impaired person will be able to hear that sound clearly. For example, digital hearing aids can recognize whether sound is speech or just noise and make important adjustments in what reaches the ear as a result of this analysis. They can tell where sound is coming from and can focus on the sounds you are looking at, while diminishing the sounds coming from other directions. They can even identify that annoying squealing some hearing aids used to emit, and can suppress it so that it is no longer there.