Clinical Studies Show Advanced Hearing Aid Technology Reduced Listening Effort – The Hearing Review – April 2016

Improving speech understanding has always been an area of improvement that hearing aid technology has been working on. However, it is just as important to consider the amount of listening effort that is required by a patient. Listening with a lot of effort is likely to increase genitive load and that can negatively impact other mental processes. Believe it or not, listening fatigue has also been associated with an increased risk of falling among older adults. A recent study has measured EEG activity in 12 adults that were fit with a new hearing aid with advanced features. Various features of the hearing device were activated and de-activated and the EEG activity demonstrated that listening effort was reduced when each feature was activated.