Getting used to hearing aids

Hearing aids enable you to hear the world and communicate satisfactorily with those around you. But before you can fully enjoy a conversation with friends, a play, or your favourite music, you need to gradually familiarise yourself with your hearing equipment. Our hearing aid acousticians will work with you during the trial period, before you purchase your hearing aid, to help you integrate it into your daily life. Here are the key steps to regaining good hearing and gradually forgetting that you're wearing hearing aids.

Although hearing aids are made to measure and adapted to the anatomy of the user's ear, they initially feel like a "foreign body", which makes its presence known and can occasionally cause itching. Yet, it should never be painful. If you feel any physical discomfort, you should return to your hearing aid acoustician so that he can examine the situation and give you the best possible advice. You should wear your equipment regularly every day until you eventually forget about it altogether.

Handling the hearing aid plays a vital role in its effectiveness. It is not always intuitive, and fitting the hearing aid must be mastered through patient repetition of the right gesture. After a few days, putting on your hearing aid will become a simple and natural act.

Incorrectly fitted hearing aids can lead to the following problems: physical discomfort that can even injure the ear, reduced hearing performance, feedback (whistling that alters sound quality), and the risk of losing the hearing aid. You should also remember to recharge your hearing aids every night, or have a spare battery, to ensure that they work optimally throughout the day.

Finally, as the ear is a hot and humid environment, you need to clean your equipment regularly. Visilab provides a Starter Kit with the appropriate products, included in our basic services.

The aim of hearing aids is to help you understand what you are saying to those around you. As hearing loss generally develops gradually over time, rehabilitation is also a gradual process, adapted to each individual's pace during the trial period. 

At the fitting stage, the hearing aid acoustician defines the optimum correction target ear by ear, to ensure a good balance in hearing sensation (stereophonic hearing). This target is then scaled so that each person can relearn to hear at their own pace. This process is adapted individually as the learning process progresses, and according to the impressions of the person concerned.

Once wearers have integrated the presence of their hearing aids and become accustomed to hearing again through their hearing equipment, they are able to understand speech and messages addressed to them. To measure the benefit of this new knowledge, our audioprosthetists carry out phonetic tests in natural listening conditions (without the devices, then with them, to quantify the improvement obtained).

At the end of the trial period, the result obtained is as close as possible to the optimum correction defined at the time of fitting, and the user has also been able to integrate all these new elements into her / his daily life; they have been able to "test and approve" the benefits of their hearing aid. At the end of this process, users are completely comfortable with their hearing equipment, in the same way as they would be with a pair of glasses or contact lenses.