- Hi guys, Cliff Olson and Doctor of Audiology
and Founder of Applied Hearing Solutions
in Phoenix, Arizona.
And in this video,
I'm talking about four new hearing aid technologies
that will completely change your life.
Coming up.
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If you take a look at hearing aids from the 70s, 80s,
and even up to the mid 90s,
they were basically just amplifiers
with very limited customization capabilities
and virtually no additional features
to help you hear better.
Best case scenario back in the day
is that you could find a hearing aid
that didn't whistle all the time
and it could help you hear better,
at least in quiet situations.
Fortunately, the demand for hearing aids was high enough
that hearing aid manufacturers
could justify investing millions of dollars in research
and development over the years
to develop new hearing aid technology
that could do more than just make sound louder.
However, in my opinion,
there are four different hearing aid technologies
that have had an overwhelmingly positive impact
on the performance and capabilities
of today's modern hearing aids.
But before I get into what those four technologies are,
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Also, I would like to give a huge thanks to Oticon,
today's video sponsor, but more on them in a little bit.
The first hearing aid technology
that will completely change your life
is lithium rechargeability.
Rechargeable hearing aids have been around for a while,
but they have been incredibly unreliable.
Many of them took forever to charge.
And when you did get them completely charged,
they didn't even last you a whole day.
This old rechargeable technology
consisted of nickel metal hydride and silver zinc batteries.
Both of which, like I mentioned, were horrible,
but these have been replaced by lithium battery technology.
Lithium battery technology is nothing new,
but it took hearing aid manufacturers a while
to figure out how to get this lithium technology
inside of a hearing aid
that is no bigger than the tip of your pinky finger.
It is only been within the past few years
that this lithium rechargeable battery technology
made its way into hearing aids,
which made them much longer lasting
and much quicker to charge.
But more importantly, these lithium batteries
are much more reliable than the nickel metal hydride
and silver zinc rechargeable batteries of the past.
So now you can get a rechargeable hearing aid
that lasts you all day long,
and you don't have to constantly worry
about when it's gonna fail.
The second hearing aid technology
that will completely change your life
is Bluetooth wireless connectivity.
Bluetooth is probably the most popular
technological innovation inside of hearing aids
since digital hearing aids hit the market in the late 1990s.
It allows you to stream audio from a smartphone, tablet,
or even a TV directly into your hearing aids
without having to use a neck loop or other accessory
to facilitate the audio stream.
This way, you can listen to whatever you want,
whether it's a YouTube video, a podcast, an audio book,
music, a phone call, or even your favorite TV show
directly into both of your hearing aids
at the properly amplified levels
to overcome your hearing loss.
Not only is the audio quality significantly better
when you can directly stream it into both of your ears,
but it is extremely convenient as well
because you don't need to use any other accessories.
In fact, Bluetooth is that one feature
that makes individuals without a hearing loss
want to get hearing aids so they can stream audio
directly into their ears at any point in time,
throughout the day,
without having to break out a pair of Bluetooth headphones.
All right, on to the third hearing aid technology
that will completely change your life.
And that is custom earmolds.
While Bluetooth wireless technology
is clearly the most popular hearing aid feature,
custom earmolds are probably the most important
hearing aid feature when it comes to helping you
hear the best that you possibly can with your hearing aids.
Yet, most hearing aid users are completely oblivious
to the importance of a quality earmold with proper venting.
One thing that can severely limit the performance
of even a premium level hearing aid
is the inability to properly customize that hearing aid
because you're only using a generic rubber dome on it.
While some hearing losses do better with a rubber dome,
other hearing losses do better with a custom earmold
with venting to ensure proper levels of amplification.
If you're using rubber domes,
but you actually need custom earmolds,
then you are leaving a significant amount of benefit
on the table due to the inability
of properly programming your hearing aids.
Most modern day custom earmolds
are now created by your hearing care professional,
taking a 3D digital impression of your ear
and sending that impression into a hearing aid manufacturer.
The hearing aid manufacturer
will then take this digital impression and use a 3D printer
to make a hearing aid earmold
that will perfectly fit your ear canal
like this MicroShell Earmold from Oticon.
The result is an earmold that is practically invisible
and will dramatically improve the performance
of your hearing aid.
And the fourth hearing aid technology
that will completely change your life
is the use of deep learning to improve sound processing
like you see inside of the More hearing aid
developed by Oticon, today's video sponsor.
Until now, hearing aids have been limited
by an engineer's ability to manually create algorithms
to tell a hearing aid which sounds are important enough
to amplify and which sounds are not important enough
to amplify.
But Oticon changed all this
by developing a deep neural network
to train their More Hearing Aids
using deep learning.
Now, if this concept seems confusing, don't worry.
I have another video where I explain deep learning
and deep neural networks in better detail
and I will link that video in the description.
But it basically means
that instead of manually creating algorithms,
telling a hearing aid how to process sound,
Oticon engineers developed a deep neural network
trained with over 12 million sounds,
so the deep neural network could teach itself
how to process sound.
This way, Oticon's More hearing aid
is not restricted to the limited capacity
of a human engineer to develop an algorithm
telling it how to process sound.
Now I get it, the use of deep learning
probably doesn't get you as excited as rechargeability
or Bluetooth connectivity, but don't worry
because the Oticon More Hearing Aids
have lithium rechargeable hearing aid batteries,
as well as Bluetooth connectivity
with Android and Apple devices.
On top of that, they also have some of the best earmolds
in the world, especially their new MicroShell Earmold.
However, in my opinion, the utilization of deep learning
to train hearing aids how to process sound
has already begun to revolutionize
the entire hearing aid industry.
And it is probably the most important
technological innovation that we've seen
inside of hearing aids since the development of Bluetooth.
Overall, if you have hearing loss,
there is no better time to need hearing aids than right now,
due to all of the technological innovation
that has occurred over the past few years.
So whether it's the convenience of rechargeability,
the ability to stream audio directly into your hearing aids
from a smart device using Bluetooth,
the ability to get better sound quality
with a custom earmold, or the ability to use deep learning
to train your hearing aids how to process sound,
the technological innovation inside of today's hearing aids
will completely change your life.
That's it for this video.
If you have any questions,
leave them in the comment section below.
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Also feel free to check out my website, dr.cliffaud.com.
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