Useful Hearing Aid Features For School-Age Children
When your child goes off to school, you may be looking to reduce the impact of hearing problems on their learning. There are several modern hearing aid features that help children combat different hearing issues in the classroom. Here are some features to discuss with your audiologist.
Wireless Capability
Wireless technology can be useful for a child in a classroom in many ways. First of all, you may be able to have your teacher use a bluetooth microphone that can be connected directly to your child's hearing aid. This way the sound will be transmitted directly, without having to pass through all of the noises in the classroom. This solution is also more discreet than some other available solutions.
Classrooms are using a lot more media to teach, whether it be videos, music, or interactive computer programs. These features may also be able to be hooked up wirelessly to your child's hearing aids, allowing them to enjoy the experience more easily.
Automated Options
Another thing that can be very useful at school is a hearing aid with options for automation. There are so many different environments within the school, such as noisy classrooms, quiet classrooms, the lunch room, the playground, and others— and each comes with its own noise levels and special challenges. With an automated hearing aid, you can choose preselected settings and program them at the touch of a button, making it easier for your child or their teacher to change the settings when the child goes into different settings in the school.
Noise Reduction
Finally, noise reduction features in hearing aids can be quite helpful for students. If your child has been using the same hearing aid for many years, it may be worth looking into the capabilities of the newest noise reduction software, which has added many digital features. For instance, the software may be able to pick up on certain unwanted frequencies or noise profiles and edit them out of the sound that's transmitted to your child's ear. In the classroom, where there is often a lot of white noise, this capability can be very useful.
While this isn't a full list of useful hearing aid features for children, it's a great start to talking with your child's audiologist, like one at Advantage Hearing & Audiology, about useful hearing aid technology for school-age children. Hopefully you can find a great model of hearing aid for your child that fits within your budget.