Advantages of Digital Hearing Aids

Advantages of Digital Hearing Aids

There are many current and potential advantages of fully  digital hearing aids

The biggest advantage is that they can perform more complex processing than is possible in ananlog hearing aids.Some operations just cannot realistically be done in ananlog aids(e.g. block processing to finely represent signals in the frequency domain)and many operations can be done with less power and circuit size if done digitally. Digital hearing aids are also able to make decisions about how to process the sound,depending on what they sense the overall acoustic environment to be. Further, provided they have enough processing capacity, digtal circuits containing a general arithmetic processor can potentially be updated with new processing schemes as knowledge advances or hearing loss changes.

Anohter advantage of digital processing is that with advances in technology, the physical size and power consumption of digital circuits is reducing at a faster rate then is the case for analog circuits. Digital hearing aids had advanced sufficiently that they required slightly less power and volume then analog hearing aids performing operations of similar moderate complexity. The power and size advantage of digital hearing aids will grow rapidly with time. The hearing aids can be made smaller if the intergated circuit is smaller. If the intergated circuit consumes less power, a smaller battery can be used for the same battery life. Consequently the hearing aids can again be made samaller, because of all these advantages, digital hearing aids will fully replace analog hearing aids. Several major manufactuers have already ceased developing new analog hearing aids.