The other day I was listening to a podcast on podcasting. The hosts had an interesting conversation about how many people in the audience were hearing impaired. The hosts asked the person in the front row, “How many of you are hearing impaired?” The person in the front row looked at the audience and thought for several minutes before saying “I’m hearing impaired”. My jaw just dropped.
I was in my late twenties at the time and I had been trying to get my hearing checked for years. Now that I have, I realize that I’ve never had a hearing aid. No one had ever told me that my hearing was being checked before I was diagnosed with a hearing loss.
Hearing aids can be purchased at your local Hearing Aid Exchange Center, or you can get them at a hearing testing center. A hearing test will only tell you if your hearing is normal or impaired. If you can hear and understand you should get an hearing aid. If you can’t hear or you have a hearing loss, you should get counseling and treatment to correct the problem.
Hearing aids are expensive and not a very common thing. A few years ago they were practically unheard of, but today over a million people have them. In our research we found that over a third of hearing aids do not work for over a third of people. This is because hearing aids are a very “non-intuitive” device. They are a small microphone that sits in your ear, and it uses your brain to interpret sounds.
Because of the nonintuitive nature of hearing aids it is easy for us to think that they don’t work at all. Unfortunately, in our research, we found that hearing aids can actually interfere with certain types of speech. For example, some people who wear hearing aids, especially older people, can actually have their speech slurred. So if you have hearing aids, you may want to consider making them more comfortable.
Not only is hearing loss linked to a decline in speech ability and quality, but it’s also linked to a decline in general hearing ability. Many older people can easily hear things just by looking at them, but if they have hearing aids, or other speech impairments, they might have difficulty hearing things like people whispering in the background. Hearing aids can also cause people to develop anxiety.
If you have hearing aids or hearing loss, you may want to consider making them a little more comfortable. Not only is hearing loss linked to a decline in speech ability and quality, but its also linked to a decline in general hearing ability. Many older people can easily hear things just by looking at them, but if they have hearing aids, or other speech impairments, they might have difficulty hearing things like people whispering in the background. Hearing aids can also cause people to develop anxiety.
In the early 2000s there was an emerging movement for using hearing aids to provide “headphones” to people, but that idea fell by the wayside. Since then, things like hearing aids with a built in microphone and other accessories have become more common in the world of hearing aids. These hearing aids are very comfortable, and are often used in conjunction with a microphone to amplify the sound that they hear.
This is exactly what remote control headphones are all about. They’re meant to let you control your music without having to press a button on your phone. They usually also come with a built in microphone and an app that controls its volume.
These headphones are actually pretty simple to use. Just plug them into the headphone jack of your phone, and you can adjust what kind of music you hear. You can even use the app to set the volume and mute your phone, too. That’s where the remote control comes in, but like most of the other remote controls, you can also use it to make your phone vibrate.