Listening with the Blues

Bluetooth that can radically improve the effectiveness of your ears—it’s the kind of sentence that wouldn’t have made any sense a couple of decades ago.

But, these days, Bluetooth technology is fairly ubiquitous. We use it in our homes, our cars, and our workplaces. Now we’re getting a little more intimate with it, as it has found its way into a major player in our healthcare: the hearing aid.

The way it works is via a tube that directs the sound from behind the user’s ear into their ear canal. There is then an external component placed behind the user’s ear that allows complete control via a separate phone app. This accentuates the control the user has over what he or she wants to listen to.

So, for example, the hearing aid’s microphone can be wirelessly connected to any kind of Bluetooth-enabled device, like a smart television, phone, music system or GPS.

This allows the user to hone in on exactly what he or she wants to hear. It’s like wearing headphones without having to look like you’re the DJ at a nightclub.

This advanced technology is also advantageous even when it can’t be used to connect to wireless audio directly. It is sophisticated enough to focus the hearing aid’s microphone on a specific sound source, heightening it against other surrounding noise.

So, a user is able to hone in on a particular person in a crowded conversation, in a similar way to tuning a radio to one station in a sea of options.

Bluetooth has revolutionised the way we do so many things, and by doing it wirelessly has decluttered a lot of our lives from the world of cords.

This technology is doing the same thing for people’s own quality of life. Not only is it achieving the primary objective of improving its user’s hearing, but by removing the ‘clutter’ of bulky hearing aids—not to mention the stigma of wearing one—it means more people can benefit from it.

And like so much other technology in our rapidly-evolving world, who knows what is around the corner to help more people find their sounds worth hearing.