Dr Brian Walden
The most frequent complaint of persons with impaired hearing is difficulty understanding speech in background noise. Persons with impaired hearing require a more favorable signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) to understanding speech in background noise than do normal-hearing persons. Although many digital hearing aids on the market feature noise reduction circuits, they do little to improve S/N and, therefore, have little effect on speech understanding. Hearing aids equipped with directional microphones can improve the S/N, but are dependent upon certain conditions existing in the listening environment. This presentation will discuss how directional microphones work and under what environmental conditions they can be expected to provide benefit to the patient. A simple strategy will be presented that allows patients to set their switchable omnidirectional-directional hearing aids in the preferred microphone mode in any listening situation encountered in everyday life.