Hearing aids have helped a 7-week old boy listen to the sounds of his mother's voice for the first time. View his reaction in the video below.
According to the boy's parents, he was diagnosed with moderate to severe hearing loss in both ears.
A digital hearing aid contains a silicon chip comprising millions of electrical components that continuously process incoming sound. It converts the signals into clearer and more audible sounds and then feeds these into the ear. A hearing aid is built to distinguish between sounds that are amplified and unwanted background noise, which are reduced. This differentiation allows wearers to distinguish similar sounding speech sounds much more clearly. Hearing aids also have a built-in function to recognize loud sounds, such as traffic, so that they don't further amplify the signals.
