How to Program Your Hearing Aids

Programming your hearing aids is the essential, last step to getting the hearing correction you need. Programming your hearing aids is all about calibrating each hearing aid correctly so it corrects your specific hearing issues so that you hear correctly. Programming your hearing aids is essential for new hearing aids, but you can also get your audiologist to help you program old hearing aids to get optimum performance over time.

You don’t have to program your hearing aids on your own. This is a service offered by Harbor Audiology. We make time to work with every patient to program hearing aids to make sure all of our patients achieve the best hearing possible.

Your Hearing Aids Aren’t Like Anyone Else’s

Programming hearing aids isn’t a one hearing aid-fits-all proposition. Modern hearing aids are so complex that no two pairs are alike, and every patient needs their audiologist’s personal attention to bring out the best features in the product.

One of the major advances in hearing aids has been the elimination of feedback. Noise and feedback used to be a problem with nearly all hearing aids. The latest models, however, have built-in computers with complex algorithms that make adjustments just for your unique combination of hearing correction needs.

What Will Your Audiologist Do to Program Your Hearing Aids?

One of the tools your hearing aid specialist at Harbor Audiology will use to program your hearing aids is surround sound.

Especially if you are getting hearing aids for hidden hearing loss, that is, you can still hear sound at various frequencies but you can’t sort out a single conversation in a crowded, noisy room, you need hearing aids that will stand up to surround sound. There are many situations in day-to-day life when the measure of good hearing is to be able to follow a single, important conversation in a sea of background noise.

Surround sound simulations are a good way to adjust hearing aids so you can pick out a single sound in a noisy environment. Programming your hearing aids to deal with noisy simulations is the most effective way to make sure they are ready for use in the real world.

Think of programming in a surround sound simulation as a kind of troubleshooting. Working with your audiologist in the simulation, you can be sure that your hearing aids will give you good hearing in noisy, real-world situations from the first day you have them.

Live Speech Mapping

Audiologists used to verify hearing aid settings with a bundle of tools known as Real-Ear Measurement, electroacoustic analysis, sound field assessment, speech testing, and diaries asking the people wearing the hearing aids to keep a record of times they didn’t work.

For the older, analog hearing aids, these were the best tools available. But all of these older methods have been updated for the newer digital hearing aids with a method called live speech mapping. 

Live speech mapping uses speech-like signals to simulate real speech, with all of its changing spectral aspects and fluctuating amplitudes. These artificial signals test digital hearing aids through more conditions than was ever possible with the old Real-Ear Measurement tools. They test your hearing aids in lots of situations, fast.

But live speech mapping also uses inputs from the people you listen to the most, your spouse, your children, your friends, sometimes even your pets. Live speech mapping makes sure your hearing aids work in the greatest possible range of situations, but also in the situations you need them the most.

Live speech mapping works for every hearing aid and for all its features. You and your audiologist never have to turn off any of their features to make them work. It works for live or recorded speech or music in real-time, and it can be linked to a visual display that tells you exactly which features need to be reprogrammed to give you the best possible results. These results can be saved for future hearing aid adjustments.

Just About Any Feature Can Be Tweaked on the New Digital Hearing Aids

When you are working with your hearing specialist at Harbor Audiology to program your hearing aids, you will be fine-tuning many settings on your hearing aids to achieve the best possible results.

Just some of the adjustments that can be made to give you the best possible results include:

• Background noise
• Noise reduction
• Intensity
• Frequency
• Compression

Sure, you could adjust for any of these factors on your own. If you had the old-style analog hearing aids, you probably got into the habit of adjusting your hearing aids on your own. But leaving the programming of your modern, digital hearing aids to the professionals at Harbor Audiology is faster. You can always make an appointment for a return visit if you find out there is some feature you would like to change some more.

Your hearing specialists at Harbor Audiology can provide you with the hearing care you need to achieve the best hearing possible. They can help you choose the best of the most advanced hearing aids, and then will work with you to program them for the best hearing correction possible.