Top 5 Reasons to Upgrade Your Hearing Aids – a new video from Dr. Cliff

Reasons to Upgrade Your Hearing Aids

If you were to ask ten different hearing care professionals when the best time is to upgrade your hearing aid technology, you would likely receive ten different answers. Some may tell you after your manufacturer warranty expires, and others may tell you that you should upgrade your technology after a predetermined amount of time.

There are good reasons for most of these recommendations, because most of them have at least some merit, but Dr. Cliff Olson wants to spend some time discussing what he thinks are the five best ways to identify if now is the best time for you to upgrade your hearing aid technology.

Here are some reasons you may want to upgrade your hearing aids:

1. If you lose your hearing aids, or if you damage them beyond the point that they can be repaired.
2. If the cost of repairs is becoming prohibitively expensive.
3. If your hearing aids are over the age of four years old.
4. When there is a major feature improvement that has never been done before.
5. If your older hearing aid technology is no longer capable of treating your hearing loss.

Major feature improvements are a game changer when it comes to better hearing: 

The fourth reason why Dr. Cliff Olson thinks you should upgrade your hearing aids is when there is a major improvement in hearing aid technology that has never been done before.

People have seen many of these improvements over time that would have justified upgrading your hearing aid technology, even if the hearing aids were significantly less than four years old. Recently, another major upgrade with the development of the M&RIE receiver from ReSound.

Most of the hearing aids that are distributed today are called receiver-in-canal devices, otherwise known as RICs. The concept of the RIC hearing aid is that a portion of the hearing aid actually sits behind your ear where it has the battery, the microphones, and the computer chip that process the incoming sound.

The RIC hearing aid has a wire that goes down into your ear canal, which has a receiver on the end of it that is inside of your canal, think of this receiver as the speaker. The microphone collects the sound, the chip processes of the sound, and then the sound is sent into your ear canal to the receiver, where it is amplified for you to hear better.

The biggest disadvantage of this style of hearing aid (RIC) is that the microphones actually sit behind your ears, which means that you lose all of the benefits of the pinna effect. The pinna effect provides a variety of different benefits when it comes to hearing, including being able to identify where sound is coming from, helping you focus on that sound and helping you hear more naturally in a background noise situation.

The reason that the new M&RIE receiver on the ReSound ONE hearing aid should make you consider upgrading your technology is because it solves the problem of losing the pinna effect by taking the microphone from behind your ears and putting them back inside of your ears. M&RIE actually stands for microphone and receiver in ear. Here at ReSound, we figured out how to include this microphone on the back of a receiver that goes entirely inside of your ear canal. Users also report that things sound more natural because that sound is collected inside the ear canal, as nature intended, instead of behind the ear.

This is the first time in history that anyone has successfully figured out how to place a microphone inside of your ear, using a Receiver-in-Canal (RIC) technology, in order to preserve the benefits of the pinna effect, and still keep all the other advanced features available in this style of hearing aid.

Another major benefit of taking the microphone and putting them inside of your ear canals is that it significantly reduces the perception of wind noise, which can be a major problem for these traditional microphone placements behind your ears with a receiver-in-canal hearing aid. The M&RIE receiver on the ReSound ONE hearing aids allows you to better localize which direct sound is coming from because it gives you back more of your natural pinna effect.

Major hearing aid feature improvements like our M&RIE receiver are what make the decision to upgrade your hearing aid technology a much easier one. Knowing the best time to upgrade your hearing aids can be a little confusing, but it doesn’t have to be. If any one of these five reasons that Dr. Olson just gave for upgrading your technology happens to resonate with you, then now may be the perfect time for you to upgrade your hearing aid technology, so you can start hearing your absolute best.

To see more of Dr. Cliff Olson’s video, visit: https://www.youtube.com/c/DoctorCliffAuD.