I can’t understand why hearing aids are usually just fitted to an audiogram. Hearing aids need to work well in everyday sound levels, but typically they are set up to predictions – and there seems to be a whole industry engaged in developing predictions – which don’t work very well, so that you have to have a highly qualified professional tweak it away from the prediction. It made me think of an analogy with my shower. My shower has a somewhat unintuitive mixer tap. The angle from the wall (tipping the handle towards me) determines the flow, and the rotation of the handle determines the temperature. However, the control for the flow works slightly differently for the hot and the cold. To deal with this in the morning I fiddle with the temperature till the water flow and the temperature are comfortable.

Taking the hearing aid analogy though, I would set up the “cold” to determine what the coldest water temperature that I could tolerate was. Then I would call in a tertiary qualified professional to load in a formula to set up the overall temperature to what it should be (based on overage preferences) then another tertiary qualified person would “tweak” the setting away from the prediction to what I am prepared to use. They might even do some thermometer checks to make sure that my temperature judgements were suitable. Hmmm.

Actually I prefer just to set it up myself. So, self-fit hearing aids, where the technology lets you set it up so you choose what’s comfortable (and it stays comfortable) makes a lot of sense.  It has to be a hearing aid system designed to do this, such as IHearYou. Hearing aids that are so smart that you can set them up yourself, saving time and money. Find out more at Blamey Saunders Hears – and if you order our hearing aids, be sure not to overcomplicate things.