Hi guys. Cliff Olson,
Doctor of Audiology and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix,
Arizona.
And in this video I'm gonna give you three things that you can do to hear better
in background noise, coming up!
Do you know the one thing that every single person who wears hearing aids wants?
It's not rechargeability, it's not Bluetooth connectivity,
it's not invisibility, and it's not even a lower price.
The number one thing that everybody wants from their hearing aids is to be able
to hear better in background noise.
We know this because every survey in the history of surveys given to individuals
who use hearing aids,
the desire to hear better in background noise is always the number one priority.
Unfortunately, hearing better and background noise is extremely difficult,
but there are three things that you can do to dramatically improve how well you
function in these noisy environments.
You just have to know what these things are and how to employ them properly,
and that is what I'm gonna talk about in this video. But before I do,
if you could do me a huge favor and click the like button,
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because that ensures that you never miss when my newly released videos and I
release multiple new videos every single week. That being said,
I greatly appreciate it and a big shout-out to Resound who sponsored today's
video, but more in them in a little bit.
There are a number of different reasons why understanding speech and background
noise is so difficult.
The first reason is that background noise tends to be more low frequency in
nature,
and most individuals who have hearing loss have good low frequency hearing with
not so good mid and high frequency hearing.
But this creates an effect of you being able to hear the background noise really
well,
but you don't have access to the high frequency speech components to separate
speech from the noise. The second reason is that everybody needs at least some
separation of speech from background noise in order to hear what's being said.
We call this signal-to-noise ratio loss. Basically,
SNR Loss is how much more speech you need above the background noise before you
can understand what's being said. For instance,
if you have a measured SNR Loss score of five decibels,
then you need speech of the person that you want to hear to be five decibels
louder than the background noise. On the other hand,
if you have an SNR Loss score of 20 decibels,
then you need the speech of the person talking to you to be 20 decibels louder
than the background noise before you can understand what's being said.
In this particular case,
an SNR Loss score of five and an SNR Loss score of 20 are dramatically
different from each other. All right, time for a Dr. Cliff Pro Tip.
If you do not know what your SNR Loss score is,
you can easily identify this number by going to a hearing care professional who
follows Best Practices and who administers a speech and noise test.
Once you do this speech and noise test,
they should be able to give you your exact score.
The third reason why understanding speech in a background noise situation is so
difficult if you have hearing loss is the damage that has occurred to the outer
hair cells (OHCs) inside of your Cochlea, which is your hearing organ.
Most people do not realize that your brain plays a significant role in noise
reduction by controlling your outer hair cells.
Healthy outer hair cells are responsible for increasing the vibration of sound
to make sure that that sound can actually reach your brain.
But the other function that outer hair cells have is to suppress the amount of
noise that's transmitted up the auditory nerve to the brain with the brain's
help. Unfortunately,
the vast majority of individuals with hearing loss have significant damage to
these outer hair cell structures,
which means that your ears cannot restrict the amount of noise that goes up to
your brain anymore. All right,
now for the good news and onto the three things that you can do to hear better
in a background noise situation,
and the first thing that you can do is get closer to the person that you want to
hear. When you're in a noisy situation,
you know when you go into a noisy situation and you end up leaning into the
person that you want to hear.
You're doing that because it increases the volume of their voice in decibels,
and if you can improve the signal to noise ratio enough to overcome your SNR
loss score, then you're actually going to hear them better.
Every time you cut the distance between yourself and the person that you want to
hear in half, it increases the volume of their voice by six decibels. Now,
if you're anything like me,
you will actually download a sound level meter on your smartphone so you can
measure the amount of background noise and measure the volume of the person's
voice who's talking to you. And if you know what your SNR Loss score is,
you can actually calculate how close you have to be to the person you want to
hear before you can understand them. But if you're not that good at math,
that's okay. There are other things that you can do,
including this second thing that you can do,
which is get a hearing aid that has specifically been designed to help you hear
better and background noise like the ReSound OMNIA Receiver-in-Canal hearing aid
from ReSound.
Today's video sponsor ReSound had one singular goal in mind when developing the
resound on the A hearing aid,
and that was to create a hearing aid that could help you hear substantially
better in a noisy situation. The ReSound OMNIA improves your Signal-to-Noise
Ratio by a whopping four and a half decibels over their previous
generation, ReSound ONE technology,
which is huge when it comes to hearing better and background noise.
According to Resound,
this Signal-to-Noise Ratio improvement is equivalent to 150% better speech
understanding and noise compared to their previous generation technology.
This means that you do not have to get all up into your friend's face to be able
to understand what they're saying. If you're in a noisy room,
resound achieve this better performance and background noise by improving three
key things about the ReSound OMNIA hearing aid.
The first thing being improving the transition speed between their different
program settings,
it resounds all around program inside of their omni hearing aids.
They can transition you between seven different automatic program settings and
do it substantially faster than what they could with their previous generation
technology. This means that you don't have to wait for your hearing aid to
switch into the proper settings,
giving you better speech understanding and background noise a lot quicker.
The second thing they improved was their 360 degrees sound awareness.
By taking sounds from the opposite side of your head and transitioning them to
your other ear,
it actually fills in this dead space that you have from the head shadow effect,
so you can actually get better sound awareness from that opposite side.
And since ReSound takes the approach of making one of your hearing aids
directional and the other one omnidirectional,
it gives you better sound awareness around you and also good speech
understanding from in front of you. And third,
and perhaps the most important feature that ReSound improved upon to achieve
this four and a half decimal signal to noise ratio improvement was a redesign of
their microphone beamformer. This time around ReSound engineers performed
modeling to include the head, neck,
and torso when determining which sounds they needed to cancel to reduce the
perception of background noise.
This dramatically improved their ability to do this noise cancellation with the
new ReSound OMNIA hearing aids compared to their previous generation technology.
But closing the distance between you and the person you want to hear and getting
better hearing aid technology are not the only things that you can do to hear
better in a background noise situation.
The third thing that you can do is use an assistive listening device.
Devices like remote microphones can dramatically improve how well you hear in a
background noise situation because you take it and you clip it on the shirt of
the person that you want to hear.
It takes their voice right next to their mouth and sends it directly into both
of your hearing aids before a bunch of background noise can mix into it. When
using a remote microphone like there ReSound, Multi mic or Micro mic,
you can actually improve your Signal-to-Noise Ratio by up to 20 decibels.
Let me tell you this,
A 20 decibel improvement in signal to noise ratio is the difference between not
hearing a single thing that your friend is saying at a restaurant and hearing
everything that they're saying without a problem.
The best part is you can combine these remote microphones with hearing aids that
have been designed to help you hear better in background noise. This way,
you have all of your bases covered. If you find yourself in a noisy situation,
Achieving better hearing and background noise does not have to be impossible.
You just have to understand what makes hearing and background noise more
difficult and be able to employ the tips and tricks to help you hear better.
Of course, if you do not know what your signal to noise ratio loss score is,
I do highly recommend that you find a hearing care professional who can get that
score for you so you know what you're up against. Once you know this
information,
you'll be able to identify exactly what types of accessories and hearing aids
that you need to help you hear better in those types of difficult situations.
You see,
people have been paying attention to the concerns of individuals who use hearing
aids.
The only question becomes is are you gonna take the information that you now
know and actually do something about it so you can hear better in background
noise? That's it for this video. If you have any questions,
leave them in the comment section below. If you like the video, please share it.
And if you wanna see other videos just like this,
we'll go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Also,
feel free to check out my website, HearingUp.com.