Recent market data indicate that 71% of hearing aid users express overall satisfaction with their hearing aids, but there remain several well defined areas that need improving. New technologies are developed and are successful in the marketplace when they address the unmet needs of the consumers.

So, what changed to make them successful today? Technology advanced enough to enable their application in a usable fashion: multiband compression could be implemented in a small form factor and with low noise the directivity of directional microphones improved, and they were designed to allow switching between omnidirectional and directional modes to avoid noise issues feedback cancellation allowed greater gain in open-canal devices, and the acoustics were improved to increase the usable bandwidth. 2– 4 Directional microphones had been tried in hearing aids, as had noise reduction and even open-canal fittings by 1990, none with much success. Few would have even thought at that time that multiband wide dynamic range compression (WDRC) would become the de facto standard processing for hearing impairment a significant body of research had been published before 1990 that indicated WDRC was unnecessary and perhaps detrimental. Open-canal products have increased in popularity because feedback cancellation allowed for of improved comfort and the elimination of occlusion problems, even though the amount of gain provided by these devices is limited by the acoustics of the design.įew people would have predicted such advances in the hearing aid industry at the beginning of the 1990s. 1 More than half of those hearing aids included directional microphones, providing verifiable improvements to speech understanding in noise. In 2005, 93% of the hearing aids sold in the United States contained DSP technology. The introduction of digital signal processing (DSP) into hearing aids in 1996 allowed advanced 1 signal processing algorithms to be implemented.

Hearing aid technology has progressed dramatically over the past 10 years.

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