2018 Wellness Expo

Page 32 2018 Wellness Expo LINCOLN DAILY NEWS Wednesday, February 21, 2018 usually colored like your skin tone. Since they are so hidden, they don’t make you feel conspicuous and freakish, indicating to everyone who sees you that you have a deficiency. Wearing a hearing aid today will help you appear and seem more like normal. The technology has changed completely. Grandpa’s hearing aid was an analog box that was just designed to just make everything louder by amplification. It whistled because there was often feedback from the microphone on the box around his neck coming too close to the speakers in his ears. It had only one channel. And grandpa’s hearing aid only had one control for each ear, a tiny screw that he could turn with the tip of his finger to make it louder or quieter. The output in grandpa’s ear was at times tinny, other times scratchy and often filled with static. Today’s hearing aid is actually a digital computer, with a tiny digital signal processor inside the tiny hearing aid. It produces crystal clear sound without sounding tinny, without interference or whistling, and is controllable on as many as 96 different frequency channels. This enables the hearing aid to be tuned specifically to correct your individual hearing deficits. But there is more to today’s hearing aid than just amplifying individual frequency channels. Many people have difficulty hearing when there is background noise. Today’s digital hearing aids can be tuned to block out background noise so that you can concentrate on the conversation with the person right in front of you and hear them perfectly. This in itself is a great blessing. The people you love the most will be able to be heard in just about any context. And you can hear them speak without them having to be directly in front of you where you can see their lips move. Another thing that today’s digital hearing aids do is to provide technology to deal with the disturbing, continuous influence of tinnitus. Tinnitus is a whistling or humming sound in your ear which goes on day and night, often leaving the tinnitus sufferer feeling exhausted and easily annoyed. Many who wear today’s hearing aids find that their tinnitus is either significantly reduced or gone completely. And now some hearing aid manufacturers have included specific noise-cancelling tuning that the tinnitus sufferer can use to actually cancel out any remaining tinnitus. The result is that you feel more rested, more energetic, and more cheerful because the constant annoyance is gone. With today’s hearing technology, the result is that you can hear like a normal hearing person. You can clearly hear the people who are speaking to you. You can clearly hear your own voice and hear that all these years you have been speaking much too loudly. You can hear the television set without the volume being turned up too far for others to be in the room. You can even hear your own knees creaking (a feature included at no additional cost). CONTINUED →