Where we are going with hearing loss

…..hearing is still crucial, and an estimated 10 percent of people worldwide suffer from hearing impairment. Enter increasingly sophisticated hearing aids and cochlear implants.

Brent Edwards of the Starkey Hearing Research Center brought up a topic I haven’t heard before — the brain strain that faces people with limited hearing.

“We know that the hearing impaired are a lot more stressed,” he said. People can actually become fatigued after straining to listen for an hour. That’s made noise-reduction technology crucial for the advancement of hearing aids. “Noise reduction does reduce the amount of effort necessary to understand speech through noise,” he said.

Now here’s the really neat part:

“We’ve also shown that memory is improved through hearing aid technology. If fewer resources are being applied cognitively to speech understanding, they can be applied to other tasks.”

Is he right? The jury is out on this one. Acoustics designers, take note: We need you to design better conference rooms.