Hearing loss affects about 10 percent of the world’s population. Hearing aids are the most popular amplification choice for these individuals. With the introduction of digital signal-processing technologies, today’s hearing aids are vastly different from their predecessors. Advances in digital chip designs and technologies have taken leaps in miniaturizing hearing aids while ensuring they are reliable, safe and easy to use. Many historically unattainable concepts have become possible thanks to these new innovations.
People with hearing loss often have more difficulty understanding speech in noise than people with normal hearing. When the ability to understand speech in noise is expressed in a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for understanding 50% of speech (SNR-50), the SNRs-50 of people with hearing loss may be as much as 30 dB higher than that of people with normal hearing. One of the most common complaints of hearing aid users is difficulty understanding speech in noise. This means that for a given background noise, the speech needs to be as much as 30 dB higher for people with hearing loss to achieve the same level of understanding as people with normal hearing. Recently, many adaptive or automatic features have been implemented in digital hearing aids, and most of these features are accomplished by signal processing algorithms.
This edition aims to provide readers with insights into the current hearing aid solutions and their rapid evolution.
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