Widex, Siemens and Miracle Ear Hearing Aids All Have One Thing in Common, They Help Hearing Impaired People Hear the Sounds of the World
The Miracle Ear hearing aid began in 1948 with a aviator pilot turned inventor from World War II who first invented a radio pillow for those hospital bound soldiers to listen to music and news reports; however this idea was rejected and something similar to the hearing aid was born.
A few short years later, the Dahlberg, Inc. Company was one of the first companies to offer an in-the-ear style hearing aid. Today the company is one of the premier technology leaders in hearing aid manufacturers.
A recent advancement in hearing aid technology comes from Siemens hearing aids that have developed a new hearing aid that identifies the location of a speaker’s voice and then automatically adjusts itself to minimize surrounding noises so that the hearing impaired person may hear only the speaker’s voice.
The Siemens hearing aid is called Triano 3 BTE and it amplifies sounds coming from the area directly in front of the user while at the same time minimizing signals and sounds from all other directions. Once the Siemens hearing aid gathers a sound it “then pass through a 16 channel signal processing unit, which identifies the type of speaking situation and automatically switches to the optimum background-noise reduction program.” A clear sounding voice is the result and this requires less effort to hear on the hearing impaired person’s part.
The Widex hearing aids company knew, back in the late 90s, that computer technology would be shrinking its components in order to fit into smaller and smaller items. And sure enough by 1998 the Widex hearing aid company was able to design and manufacture an in-the-ear digital hearing aid that addressed the major problems of hearing impaired people: clarity of sound, reduction of wind noise and speech enhancement in noisy atmospheres.
The Widex hearing aids have dual microphones with digital sound processing to hone in on the sound of someone’s speech directly in front of the hearing impaired person while at the same time reducing the background noises to a bare minimum. This is very important to a hearing impaired person because background noises are hard to ignore or ‘drown out’ like a regular hearing person might be able to.
