Hearing Aids and how they enable Hearing.
Words would probably not explain just how important a hearing aid is to a person who has lost their ability to hear. Thinking about it the technology of the hearing aid is one of the most fortunate thing to happen to humanity because hearing loss is irreversible. This is the only way for many people to reconnect with the world through sound. Hearing aids are an everyday accessory to some and others come across them on a daily basis but not all understand how they work. Before you can shed any light on hearing aids you need to look at hearing loss first.
Losing your hearing ability comes with the old age. Upon approaching the age of seventy five there is a fifty percent chance that your hearing ability will deteriorate. The exposure to very loud noises is another way through which people lose their hearing ability. Since this happens to be an environmental cause , people of young age could lose their hearing ability this way. People have suffered permanent hearing loss after exposure to loud explosions and crashes.
Working in an environment with a lot of noise requires you to have some protective gear to shield you from the noise. Recurring sounds that area over seventy five decibels which is the safe volume limit will destroy your hearing ability as well. As sounds exceed 85 decibels its takes an even shorter time to lose your hearing. The human ear is made up of several parts which work together to turn the sound waves into messages that the brains can decode. The sound waves are first turned into electrical signals which can be received by the auditory nerve of the ear. Sound enters through the air canal to hit the ear drum which vibrates to send signals to the inner ear bone, the bones translates vibrations into ripples in a fluid of the cochlea. The ripples then stimulate the hair cells in the inner ear which trigger some chemicals and that leads to generation of an electrical signal, the auditory nerve sends the signal to the brain and translates that into sounds we understands.
There are five essential parts of a hearing aid a receiver, microchip, battery , amplifier and microphone. The microphone receives sounds from the outside world and turns them into digital signals for the microchip to process. The microchip is a unit that can be customized to the user needs because not All hearing loss is the same. The amplifier makes the signals stronger but the volumes are customizable to fit the needs of the user. The role of the receiver is to turn the digital signals into vibrations the ear can understand. Hearing aids come in different types in regard to function and needs of the user.
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