How do hearing aids work? Are they just blasting what they hear directly into the ear potentially causing more damage?
In: Biology
Hearing aids aren’t just amplifiers – they filter and normalize frequencies to adjust to the weaknesses of the wearer’s ears. They are tuned for individuals by professional fitters. To answer your follow-up question, hearing aids can actually protect against loud sounds since they can block and selectively filter.
There are different types of hearing aid, because different parts of the ear could be damaged or defective.
If you look at [the diagram](https://www.bksv.com/-/media/Images/Waves/2018/01_Anatomy-of-the-human-ear/Anatomy-of-the-human-ear_01.ashx?h=552&w=875&la=en&hash=CA79680318C10B80E2A4343E8BEA13934C861455), the eardrum vibrates with the sounds in air, but that vibration is transmitted via bones to the cochlea, which is a chamber filled with liquid and soft hairs that are attached to nerves.
So if every piece of the ear anatomy is “ok”, then the hearing aid can just amplify the sounds so they vibrate the eardrum a bit harder.
Otherwise, an implanted type of hearing aid could pick up the sounds via a microphone, and apply the vibration directly to the bones (if the eardrum is ruptured). Or, with a [cochlear implant](https://cdn.prod-carehubs.net/n1/802899ec472ea3d8/uploads/2016/10/a-medical-illustration-of-a-cochlear-implant-original.jpg), the sounds picked up by the electronics are applied directly into the liquid environment inside the cochlea, bypassing the eardrum and the bones completely.
I’ve been informed (by people who have researched hearing aids quite a bit) is that the belief is that getting hearing aids can actually slow down the deterioration of hearing. I’m not sure what the mechanism for that is supposed to be, though.
The new, high end hearing aids are pretty nifty (and expensive). They include equalizers so that only the bands which need amplification are boosted. Various different settings can be used for different environments. They can be Bluetooth enabled so that phone calls can go straight to your hearing aids. They supposedly can reduce tinnitus, too.
Person who has hearing aids here. In terms of damage there is one thing that bothers me the most because nobody told me that even though It makes sense. Your hearing without them gets worse and worse which is the thing that hit me the most. I think It’s because your ears are happy that they don’t have to work hard and because of the extra help they don’t need to make their job. (That’s at least how I got told the reason)
Edit: reason is NOT true at all and was just too simplified.
Hearing aids vary. The higher end ones with a good audiologist can even help with tinnitus. My hearing aids from Costco have the feature disabled because Costco only wants to sell to people with mild loss that they can fit and be done with. But the technology with a good team can do wonders.
Imagine there are strings of different length inside the ear that vibrate to a well defined frequency and transform the signal to a nerve impulse that the brain interprets as sound.
When those strings snap we stop hearing sounds in that frequency, a hearing aid just “translates” those missing frequencies into ones that the person in question can hear
I have hearing aids, generally no, they don’t cause any more damage and my hearing is at the “severe” level (before profound/deafness.) hearing aids work by picking up sound in the microphones usually located on the rear and top they send the sound through the tube and into the ear. They also use batteries and I think some are actually rechargeable but mine are not. But I will say that they do blast anything they hear into the ear unless you alter them at a doctors not to, but the result of filtering out sounds to get voices better will lead to a shitton of jumpscares. As a result, hearing aids mostly blast everything they pick up into the ear without discrimination.
They do increase the volume of what they hear, but only up to a safe limit, so they don’t damage the ear. These limits are set by the fitter based on a hearing test.
There’s lots of other processing that they do to avoid blasting everything, and only what the hearer wants to hear. There is a LOT of research that goes into how exactly to do this.
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The tech now is pretty amazing. My husband has a set from the VA as a treatment for his tinnitus. He was in aviation fuels on an aircraft carrier during his service. They are specifically tuned to add white noise to cancel out what he hears as alternatively buzzing/ringing. Amazing. He can also answer his phone, stream music, watch movies, etc.
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