- In this video, I'm talking about
several hearing aid features that help you hear better
in background noise that most people are not even aware of.
Coming up.
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Hi, guys.
Cliff Olson, Doctor of Audiology
and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona
and on this channel,
I cover a bunch of hearing related information
to help make you a better informed consumer.
So if you're into that,
make sure you hit that subscribe button,
and don't forget to click the bell
to receive a notification every time I post a new video.
Having trouble understanding speech in background noise
is something that affects individuals
with any level of hearing loss.
That's because hearing loss makes it more difficult
for you to separate the sounds that you want to hear
like the voice of someone talking to you
from the sounds that you don't wanna hear.
Using hearing aids to help you hear better
in a quiet situation is one thing,
but helping you hear better in a complex, noisy
listening environment requires a significantly larger amount
of complex hearing aid processing in order to achieve.
For most individuals, using two hearing aids
instead of just one can go a long ways
in improving speech understanding and noise.
But you can not just use these two hearing aids
to amplify all sounds
if you're trying to understand speech better.
That's because if you just increased everything,
you're gonna be increasing the noise as well as the speech.
This is why hearing aid manufacturers are hard at work
trying to develop hearing aid technology
that helps separate speech from background noise,
no matter what degree of hearing loss you have.
The crazy thing is, most people don't even realize
that this technology exists
nor do they understand what it's actually doing.
But thanks to ReSound, today's video sponsor,
I'm gonna share exactly what these features are
and explain how they work to help you hear better
in background noise.
Not only has ReSound released
the new Microphone and Receiver-in-Ear technology
inside of the ReSound ONE hearing aids,
that I have a video on that I will link in the description,
but they also have a variety of other features
inside of these hearing aids
that can help you hear better in background noise as well.
First is All-Access-Directionality,
which is ReSounds way of using two hearing aids
to harness the benefits of directional microphones,
and combining this benefit with omni-directional microphones
to help you hear better in background noise
without reducing your awareness to sounds around you.
To understand how All-Access-Directionality works,
I should first explain the problem
that this technology solves.
Traditionally, in noisy situations,
hearing aids will utilize directional microphones
to primarily pick up sound coming from in front of you
and by limiting sound that it's amplifying next to you.
and from behind you.
The problem with this strategy
is it can reduce your awareness of sounds
that you may not want to completely eliminate,
making you feel like you're cutting yourself off
from the world around you.
To solve this problem,
ReSound uses the All-Access-Directionality strategy
to identify which side of your head
has the worst signal-to-noise ratio.
Meaning, which side of your head has the most noise
and less signal of the sound that you wanna hear.
It will take that hearing aid
and use the directional microphones
to help fight through that background noise,
while leaving the opposite side
that has a better signal-to-noise ratio,
and will leave that one in omnidirectional mode
so you get the benefits of directional microphones
for better speech understanding and noise,
but you also don't cut yourself off
from the world around you, keeping your sound awareness.
If the hearing aids only detect speech
coming from in front of you and not around you,
all access directionality will take both hearing aids
and put them into directional microphone settings
to optimize your ability to understand
who's in front of you.
This All-Access-Directionality feature is constantly working
behind the scenes to identify your listening situation
and seamlessly putting you
into different microphone configurations
to optimize your ability to hear.
For instance, one of my favorite restaurants
has an outdoor patio area
that happens to be along a busy roadway.
In this situation,
the majority of noise is always
on the side of my head that is facing the road.
So with All-Access-Directionality,
it would identify this and put that hearing aid
into directional mode
to reduce the noise as much as possible,
but it would leave the opposite side ear
in omnidirectional mode to maintain sound awareness.
If I happen to sit with my back to the road
then both hearing aids would shift
into full directional mode
in order to reduce background noise as much as possible
and to optimize speech understanding as much as possible.
Which brings me to the next feature that you can find inside
of the ReSound ONE hearing aids, which is Ultra-Focus.
Ultra-focus is an additional program that can be added
by your hearing care professional
that creates a very narrow pickup range of sound
for extremely difficult noisy environments.
You can access this program by either using the push button
on the back of your ReSound ONE hearing aids
or you can go into the Smart 3D App to activate it as well.
This ultra-focus program is perfect
if you want the control to reduce the sounds from around you
and primarily focus on the sounds that are in front of you.
Here's an example of how this feature works
and when you would want to use it.
If you're in a noisy environment
and you're sitting at a table across from your friends
and you really do not care
about any of the sounds around you
you just wanna focus on what they're saying,
then this is the perfect opportunity
for you to reach up and activate that ultra-focus program
so you can eliminate a lot of those sounds from next to you
and behind you and focus only on what your friend is saying.
Lemme rewind a second here.
That All-Access-Directionality feature
that I talked about first,
that actually gives you an improvement
of four to six decibels and signal-to-noise ratio,
when you're comparing it to omni-directional performance.
But it gives you an additional two decibels
above and beyond what you would normally get
from directional microphones.
Now, these are really big numbers,
but when you use the Ultra-Focused program
you can actually improve this performance
by an additional 30%.
Now, if by chance these hearing aid features
are just not enough for you,
you can always break out the big guns
with ReSounds Wireless Accessories.
These include the Micro-Mic and the Multi-Mic,
which can cut through background noise
like a hot knife through butter
and we'll make it seem like the person who's talking
to you in a noisy environment
is literally talking right inside of your ears.
If you also wanna learn more
about these wireless accessories,
of course I have a video on those as well,
that I will also link in the description.
At the end of the day,
knowing what your hearing aids are actually doing
to help you hear better in a background noise situation
should not be a mystery.
So whether you have a mild hearing loss
or a severe hearing loss, you should feel confident
that your hearing aids are hard at work,
making sure that you hear the sounds that you want
without letting noise get in the way.
That's it for this video.
If you have any questions,
leave them in the comment section below.
If you liked the video, please share it.
If wanna see other videos just like this one,
go ahead and hit that subscribe button.
Also feel free to check out my website,
drcliffaud.com.
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