3 Hearing Aid Features You DON'T Know About...But Should!

In this video, I'm talking about three hearing aid features you may not know about but should...coming up!

Ever since hearing aids were first created, hearing aid manufacturers have been developing new features that hearing aid users knew that they wanted. And apparently back in the day, everyone wanted their hearing aids to be as invisible as possible without any button or wire showing. Today's premium hearing aids are absolutely loaded with a bunch of awesome and quite frankly, cool features that help improve your overall experience and your ability to hear better. Many of these features like Bluetooth connectivity, which allows you to stream audio directly from a smart device into both of your hearing aids, as well as rechargeability, that allows you to take your hearing aids out at the end of the day, plug them in a charger so they are ready to go by the next morning, receive most of the attention. However, there are certain hearing aid features that are just as if not even more important than these other headline features, and you've probably never even heard about them.

Now, I'm gonna tell you about these features here in a little bit, but before I do, if you could do me a huge favor and click the like button, it really helps out my channel because it gets these videos in front of a broader audience. And while you're at it, if you have not yet hit that subscribe button with notification bell, go ahead and do that as well, because that ensures that you never miss one of my newly released videos and I release multiple new videos every single week. That being said, I really appreciate it and a big shout to ReSound for sponsoring today's video, but more on them in a little bit. All right, let's go ahead and jump into the first lesser known hearing aid feature that you might not even be aware of, and that feature is directionality. Having multiple hearing aid microphones allows hearing aids to prioritize sounds coming from certain directions and reduce amplification given to sounds coming from other directions.

This can be extremely helpful if you're in a noisy environment and you're trying to hear the person that you're talking to, but you don't want the background noise distracting you. Having these directional microphones can significantly improve how well you hear in a background noise situation and improve your overall auditory comfort. At the same time. The more narrow these directional microphones make this pickup range, the better this feature works. Of course, this is assuming that you are facing the person that you actually want to hear, which is why a lot of hearing aid manufacturers turn off directionality when you're in a quiet environment. The second lesser known hearing aid feature that you may not even be aware of but should is something called noise reduction for sudden loud sounds. Now, you may already be aware of a feature called noise reduction, but noise reduction is typically used to reduce the amount of amplification given to steady state noises in your environment like a fan or a vehicle engine.

However, when it comes to sudden loud sounds, hearing aid circuits are designed not to adjust amplification levels too fast because it can create distortion. That's why having a different type of noise reduction that is designed to reduce these sudden loud sounds is so important inside of a hearing aid. So if you do not like the sound of a door slamming a dog barking or keys being dropped on a counter, then you wanna make sure that you have this feature available inside of your hearing aids. And the third lesser known hearing aid feature that you probably don't know about, but you really should, is something called the M&RIE Receiver from ReSound. Today's video sponsor, the M&RIE Receiver, was introduced with the ReSound ONE hearing aid and is now available with their new ReSound OMNIA Hearing aid and was designed to preserve your natural pinna effect by placing a microphone on the back of a receiver inside of your ear canal.

The pinna effect offers a variety of different benefits, including being able to better identify which direction sound is coming from. It also reduces the amount of wind noise that you hear, and it even allows you to hear more naturally. Traditional receiver in canal hearing aids only have microphones behind your ears, not inside of your ear canal, so it completely removes this natural pinna effect. Many hearing aid manufacturers have artificially recreated this pinna effect using algorithms inside of the hearing aids, but as you can see here, only a microphone placed inside of the ear canal can preserve the open ear pinna effect. Like I mentioned before, one of the natural phenomena that occurs when you can preserve your natural pina effect is the better ability to identify which direction sound is coming from called localization, the preservation of the Pinna Effect, using the receivers on the ReSound OMNIA hearing aids outperforms hearing aids in omnidirectional mode that picks up sounds from 360 degrees and hearing aids trying to recreate the Pinna effect with artificial pinna compensation.

It also turns out that your ears are pretty good at blocking wind noise, which is exactly why the M&RIE receivers do better in a windy situation, because the microphones are shielded by your pinna versus being openly exposed to the wind behind your ears. And remember when I said earlier that your natural pinna effects can improve how natural things sound to you? That's because your ears have been shaping the way that you've been hearing sound since you were a little kid. And when it comes to overall sound quality, it improves when you're using a M&RIE Receiver as indicated by sound quality ratings being consistently higher. This is likely due to your brain preferring how things sound when that sound has been shaped by your natural pinna first as it enters your ear canal. Of course, if you want to ensure that the M&RIE Receiver is giving you all of these added benefits, you can use the check MyFit feature inside of the ReSound Smart 3D app as well.

But there's even more good news about the ReSound OMNIA hearing aids on top of the fact that they had this M&RIE receiver. They also have the ability to perform directionality and they have impulse noise reduction. When it comes to directionality, a ReSound has a new program called Front Focus. This new program uses an extremely narrow binary beam former to pick up speech directly in front of you. This is one of those features that allows you to hear 150% better in a background noise situation compared to ReSound's previous generation technology. And of course, if your ReSound OMNIA hearing aids are making you hear too well and you're getting too much of those impulse sounds, you can strengthen impulse noise reduction inside of the programming software to make sure that the next time someone's yelling at you, slamming a door or throwing your keys on the counter, it doesn't bother you as much.

Having a feature like impulse noise reduction inside of your hearing aids is absolutely critical if you're someone who has sound sensitivity issues. Overall, when you're looking for new hearing aids, you wanna make sure that those hearing aids have all of the features that are necessary to help you hear your best. This includes the headline features like Bluetooth connectivity and lithium rechargeable hearing aid batteries, as well as these lesser known features that I just discussed. The best advice I can give you is to ask your hearing care professional for all of the amazing features that exist inside of today's modern hearing aids, because chances are there are certain features that you are completely unaware of that could help you hear even better. 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. If you wanna take other videos just like this one, go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Also, feel free to check out my website, HearingUp.com.