Squinting with Your Ears
Hearing is a complex process and hard work for your brain. This is particularly true if you have hearing loss. Everything we hear has to be constantly evaluated to separate the relevant from the unimportant. The more sounds accompanying a sentence the harder it is to understand.
A high level of hearing strain can cause you to develop symptoms of stress. You feel tired, drained, and may find it hard to concentrate. The key to relief is hearing aids able to single out a target speaker’s voice from ambient noise to such an extent that listening effort is significantly reduced.
Hearing requires effort
Many daily situations can present enormous challenges for those with hearing loss, whether or not they wear hearing aids. Background noises make it more difficult to follow your conversation partner. The busy family breakfast, a conversation at a noisy train station, talking with colleagues in the cafeteria or chatting in a street café ― these situations require straining to hear what others are saying. Some people described the sensation as “squinting with your ears”. No wonder that you feel exhausted by the end of each day. You have listening fatigue.
These are exactly the sort of challenging hearing situations hearing aids with advanced technology can help. They can pick up the voice of someone speaking to you and elevate it above interfering sounds in the environment. It doesn’t matter whether your conversation partner is standing directly in front of or next to you, or sitting way down a table with other people ― with the right hearing aids, you’ll hear their voice clearly and distinctly.
Reverberation poses an additional challenge
Besides noisy public places, locations with reverberation make it harder to understand speech. Rooms with hard surfaces, such as bare walls or marble floors, reflect more sound and cause greater reverberation than rooms with carpet, drapes, or furniture to absorb sound waves. Unpleasant and distracting sound reflections not only occur in places where you only spend a short time, such as large foyers or entrance halls, but also in training rooms and classrooms. For hearing aids to be effective in these situations, they need to reduce these negative effects in environments requiring you to pay particular attention to what’s being heard. The speech signals have to be made clear and crisp in order to further reduce listening effort for wearers.
