I have been thinking about the changes in hearing aids over the years, and how that has affected how we use them.  I got into the area of hearing aids and audiology when I was still at school.  As a young teenager I volunteered at the Royal School for the Deaf in Derby in the UK.  It has long since moved from the building where I worked.  I’d go in on a Saturday, and generally help out, sometimes taking one or two of the children out somewhere.  This was pre cochlear implant days, and, although Derby was essentially an aural-oral school, most of the children managed very poorly with their hearing aids.  I think a 2012 time traveller to that school in the late sixties could have been forgiven for thinking that they had gone back to a somewhat earlier era.  Most of the children simply couldn’t hear, and oral-aural education was a tough call.   Better hearing aid and cochlear implant technologies have changed all this radically, by making speech sounds  audible.

The opportunities haven’t just been for the children though.  Adults with deteriorating hearing loss can now access hearing aids that are small, elegant and have sophisticated signal processing, that can be easily customised to an individual’s hearing preferences and needs.  No longer do we need to “put off” getting hearing aids. When people find  it’s hard to hear sometimes, they can easily do something about it now.

My Dad had a much tougher time.  Hearing aids were rarely provided in two’s in those days; the signal processing was not very sophisticated, and it was a fairly large and ugly device.  Despite that, he got on with the task of getting the best from it.  And that’s what successful hearing aid users do today.