How are Hearing Aids Developed?

You might not realize it, but hearing aids do more than just amplify sound. They’re actually highly complex and developed pieces of technology. Every hearing aid on the market has many years of research and development behind it, requiring the knowledge and involvement of hundreds of people.

Because today’s hearing aids have so many different technologies, developing a new model requires the input of a number of different professionals. First, project managers need to study the hearing aid market to guide their team towards solutions that meet wearers’ needs.

Unlike analogue hearing aids, which amplified all sounds the same way regardless of whether they were important, today’s hearing aids have microprocessors that use DSP, or digital signal processing. Developing those microprocessors and platforms takes years of work by engineers. In fact, the design of those microprocessors is impressive in and of itself, since they need to use a very limited amount of power and pack multiple layers of circuits into a tiny space.

While the engineers create the microprocessor and platform, programmers are busy designing the signal processing algorithms. Each algorithm is optimized to improve a specific aspect of sound. For example, one algorithm might control the frequency response, while another improves the perception of speech in noise, and yet another eliminates feedback from the hearing aids. All of these algorithms need to be lightning fast so they can process sound signals in real time. Throughout this process, hearing health professionals help make sure that the hearing aids can meet the needs of people with hearing loss and improve their listening experience.

In addition to creating the technology itself, hearing aids developers have a design team that helps make the devices durable, yet attractive. And that’s not all! Creating hearing aids also involves quality control teams and the manufacturers’ own teams.

In other words, wearers are only able to benefit from the advanced features of hearing aids thanks to years of work and a huge multidisciplinary team. Talk to your audioprosthetist to learn more about the latest technologies and discover the best solution for you.