All about hearing aid settings – Healthy Hearing

Today’s hearing aids are designed to naturally adapt to the soundscapes you enter—that is, as you go from a loud restaurant to your quiet bedroom, your hearing aid will shift accordingly, choosing programs that match the sound levels of your environment. 

“Most hearing aids come with several automatic programs that the hearing aid will actually switch into depending on what it thinks is best,” says Laura Sherry, AuD, research audiologist at Johns Hopkins Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health. 

These default programs are sophisticated and helpful—but as you go through your day, you might find that there are certain environments where the programs don’t fully meet your needs. In those scenarios, you may benefit from customizing your settings and adding personalized programs to the hearing devices. 

How are programs on your hearing aid set? 

The process begins at your audiologist: After hearing tests and selecting hearing aids, the test results are imported into the devices, Sherry explains. This helps the hearing aid know where extra volume is needed; you don’t want a hearing aid to amplify all noises equally, but rather, be strategic about increasing the volume only in the pitches where it’s needed. 

“When you import the hearing test results into the hearing aid, then the hearing aid knows to add a little bit of volume where they have a little bit of hearing loss, but much more volume where they have more hearing loss,” Sherry says. 

This is the point in the process, known as hearing aid fitting, when audiologists talk programs and settings. 

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Many of these setting are automatic, with the hearing aid transitioning from one program to another without input from the person wearing the device. The hearing aid will switch in and out of programs, as well as making determinations about how much additional volume to add, Sherry notes. 

If it detects soft sounds, hearing aids are likely to boost the volume. But hearing aids don’t add volume indiscriminately. Say you’re around a loud-talking friend or a TV with the volume at its max level. The hearing aid will notice that the volume of the input is high, and won’t add extra volume, Sherry says. 

“The goal of the hearing aid is to preserve that quality of keeping soft sounds soft, medium sounds medium, and loud sounds loud,” she explains. 

“We can make a custom [hearing aid] program for a person for whatever sound environment they might be struggling in,” Sherry says. 

But of course, the hearing aid is just a machine. There are situations where …….

Source: https://www.healthyhearing.com/report/53222-Hearing-aid-settings-customize