With so many parties and gatherings, you would think everyone would be having a great time at the holidays. Not so. Your hearing impaired friends may be having some difficulties. Hearing loss can deeply affect various aspects of a person’s overall happiness and health. The holiday season is a time when family and friends can come together to meet and revel in their happiness. Hearing loss can deeply affect various aspects of a person’s overall happiness and health. We’ll show you the effects of hearing loss on social happiness, how to manage hearing loss, and how to help people who suffer from hearing loss.

Hearing Loss Problems

The issues presented by hearing loss can be looked at as chiefly social in nature. If you cannot communicate with these people that you love, it can cause some significant effects on your overall sense of well-being. This is crucial in terms of hearing loss during the holidays because, more than anything else, the holidays are a time to gather with close family and friends. For example, people who suffer from hearing loss are much more likely to have issues with depression as well as anxiety. After all, being unable to take part in the holiday festivities is enough to get anyone feeling the holiday blues. This is only worsened by the fact that hearing loss may stop people from even going out and participating in any form of family activity in the first place. This social isolation will result in other problems in life as well, and can manifest in health problems such as brain damage and even dementia later in in life.

What Can We Do About Hearing Loss In The Holidays?

The first level of help that you can provide is by working through the basic barrier of isolation that these people with hearing loss put up. You can invite your hard of hearing family members to events and make them incredible welcome in your home. Specifically, bring them over and make sure that everyone completely understands their situation. Do not be afraid to break the ice and build the room’s conversations around them in order to build their confidence. Also, you can be sure to help people with hearing loss by making sure that you are speaking to them loudly and slowly depending on their overall preferences. Taking a person-first approach to their needs is a great idea. While the hearing loss can have an incredible impact on the way that people approach and celebrate the holidays, there are ways that you can do something about it.

Another way that you can combat hearing loss is to meet with a hearing specialist. These specialized medical professionals can work to the advantage of their patients by giving them the ability to examine possible hearing solutions available to them. After all the best way to help integrate family and friends with a more active community is being sure that they can actually hear conversations as they are happening. A hearing specialist will show you how to go about helping your hearing- surgical options and device solutions. Surgery can repair the physical structures of the ear that have been harmed throughout your life. In terms of hearing devices, there have been many advances in technology that have allowed hearing aid devices to give an amazing amount of hearing back to patients. With all of these means, hearing specialists are able to help people with their overall hearing health. They can also help them cope with the holidays.

The world is becoming clearer to many thanks to electric cochlear implants. There are many technologies available to people who suffer from a hearing impairment. While hearing aids, in all of their many editions, have been the most common solution to hearing loss, cochlear implants are becoming even more popular for individuals all over the globe. You must understand that cochlear implants are used for people who have a large amount of hearing loss, and can be a solution to both adults and children. With several technologies available to hearing impaired people, electric cochlear implants go beyond the traditional hearing aid to offer something superior to those with profound hearing loss. These devices attach to the person’s skull to make a bypass which allows sound wave to be interpreted by the auditory nerve. These differ from that of a simple hearing aid, which is worn in the ear.

How Do Cochlear Implants Function?

Cochlear implants, necessary for many people in which a hearing aid simply won’t provide the hearing help they need, allows users to experience crisp, clear sound waves for optimal enjoyment. Working through the use of four major components, all parts simulate hearing and work like a well oiled machine. The microphone is located on the outside of the ear. It detects sounds, then passes them on to the speech processor that is near the microphone, which can also be worn in other places on the body. This is where the interpretation and digitization of sound occurs in order for it to be picked up by the transmitter. The transmitter, which gives the signals to the receiver underneath the skin, passes all of the signals to the electrodes cluster located in the cochlea. This sits behind the ear and under the skin, where electrodes fire up special fibers on the auditory nerve.

Benefits of Cochlear Implants

Ideal for those who suffer from a high degree of hearing loss than cannot be addressed through a simple hearing aid, these devices allow the individual to clearly pick up on sounds such as speech and surround environmental sound. This helps the user feel safe in his or her environment as they go through their daily life. As such, electric cochlear implants are the best when it comes to the most integral hearing devices available to the hearing impaired community. Great for people kids and adults who live with a high degree of filter crowd noise.

What Makes A Cochlear Implant?

Most of the components of a cochlear implant are located on the outside of the ear, but some are placed under the skin and behind the ear. There are many significant parts to a cochlear implant. The microphone, speech processor, and a transmitter comprise the external parts of the device, while the receiver and an electrode cluster comprise the parts implanted under the skin.

Digital hearing aids make up a whopping 90 percent of all hearing aids on the market right now. That’s a pretty big feat, and there’s a reason for that. Technology has spurred this need on, allowing everything from filtration of background noise to connections to Bluetooth devices. Additionally, audiologists can now program each device according to the user’s specific degree of hearing loss. They have the ability to remove fuzzy and loud background noise, but this isn’t the only advancement around. Today’s hearing aids have come far since the 1800s, which is when the first ear trumpets arrived on the scene. While some are available with remote controls that allow the user to adjust various settings, others come with omni-directional microphones to detect sound from multiple directions.
Hearing aids were originally analog in nature but are now mostly digital.

Noise Filtration

Did you know that hearing aids can actually communicate with each other? They’re “smart.” Improvements in wireless technology have allowed for improved speech recognition and SNR, which stands for signal-to-noise ratio. A major issue for users of hearing aids is that it can be tough to properly hear with all the background noise going on. Older hearing aids amplified all sound, which was great for hearing words but this also presented an added challenge of filtering out the background noise that was also amplified. Many manufacturers, incorporating brand new technology through the use of digital magnetic wireless communication, use chips in the devices that control settings such as switch position and microphone modes.

DNR

Digital noise reduction technology contains technology that incorporates directional microphones. This is because there is a concentration on the physical characteristics of noise and speech instead of the separation of space, taking into account factors like speech modulation.

The First Digital Hearing Aids

The initial digital hearing aids were great for boosting processing speeds which improved the ability to hear as well as the range of amplification. This still rings true today. The first digital hearing aids featured DSP, ideal for digital noise reduction. DSPs, which stand for digital signal processing, were first available in 1996.

Single Sided Deafness

Things like CROS devices and bone conduction devices allow the good ear to receive signals from the bad ear to spike up amplification. People who had single-sided deafness prior to big advancements in digital technology were frustrated with background noise and were relegated to using their “good ear” to hear conversation.

Self-Learning

Did you know your digital hearing aid to learn on its own? It’s true. Self-learning hearing aids are integral to modern devices because they have self-learning or regulating tendencies. Digital hearing aids are great for adjusting settings like volume automatically after a period of time according to how the user prefers it. Control is put into the hands of the person wearing it, which is yet another advancement.

Better Connections

People wearing digital hearing aids benefit from digital noise reduction and better frequency transposition due to improvements in digital hearing aids. They can also enjoy increased range. Hooking up to Bluetooth and other wireless technological services is par for the course now.

The Outlook

Digital hearing aids represent the future of these types of devices, bringing increased versatility and comfort to their many users around the globe. Now, hearing impaired individuals have innovative wireless technology and microelectronics at their fingertips at all times to improve their daily lives.

Just as physical fitness is ideal for you waistline and heart, healthy actions when it comes to your ears are integral to many factors in your life. Here we discuss how good hearing can help you maintain your youth. With top-quality hearing, you can hold onto your youth for longer. With a better social life and self-esteem, maintaining your hearing health is critical. By maintaining your hearing, you’ll experience lots of great side effects that make you feel young. By picking up on sounds quickly when they occur, you can ward off potentially dangerous situations fast.

1. Up the flow of blood to your ears. Every time you engage in exercise, you send excellent oxygen-rich blood flow to the ears, which protects the ear canal and makes it less likely you’ll experience additional hearing loss.

2. When your hearing is crisp, you can better react to fire alarms, sirens and anything else that threatens your safety.

3. Better job performance and job prospects. When you lack good hearing, you naturally can’t hear important instructions or safety precautions. You can’t even participate productively in coworker discussions or meetings, affecting both your job performance or edge you out of your profession.

4. Keep dementia from setting in. Hearing loss and dementia are related, says the National Institute on Aging. As we age, our brains shrink, especially in those who have hearing loss. But this shrinkage also brings an increased risk of dementia.

5. More productive interactions with others. Hearing loss can alienate you from getting the information you need to lead a successful life. With a hearing impairment, it’s difficult to communicate with anyone from your boss to your friends. Instead, having better hearing means you feel more confident that you can easily talk with others, allowing you to stay engaged in the moment.

6. Better social and sex life. Hearing impaired seniors who don hearing aids have been known to experience an improved social life and sex life. In addition, they have better overall mental health and a sense of independence.

7. Increased sense of confidence. Those with difficulties in hearing can have a lack of self confidence or self-esteem because they can’t interact easily with others in social situations like parties. The result? They may avoid going to parties, meetings and get-togethers because of this fear.

8. Hear teachers better while in school. You won’t learn as well if you constantly have to sit up front and ask the teacher to repeat herself. Keeping up a good level of hearing health means you can understand the teacher’s instructions more clearly and thus have an overall easier classroom experience.

9. Fewer hospitalizations. Hearing loss can boost your risk of going to the hospital due to falls and other events, can actually lead to inactivity, which in turn leads to depression.

10. Less chance of falls. Individuals who can’t hear well don’t have as much of a stable awareness of their surroundings, and can trip and fall easier. You don’t have as high a chance of falling when your hearing is as good as it should be. People with a 25-decibel hearing loss are three times more likely to fall than others with no hearing impairments, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.