Today you will see there are many different hearing aids available to buy and most, if not all, are available today due to the advances in miniaturization technology. To see many of the available hearing aids available today, you need only go to websites like the one by Audika.dk and in fact, at those same websites can often carry out an online hearing test and receive a free trial on many of the different hearing aids available.
Even though there may be many different manufacturers of hearing aids, all of them will use miniaturization technology and most of them will be of the same three different designs. These three main designs comprise of a behind the ear hearing aid, a hearing aid which fits in the outer ear and hearing aids which are often referred to as invisible because they are placed in the ear canal where they will not easily be seen by an untrained eye. Often the behind the ear and those in the outer ear are the most popular as, although they may be seen by others, they are often cheaper than the invisible varieties. Some people though prefer the cheaper types, not because they are cheaper but because they find them more comfortable or, they may want people to see that they are hard of hearing and so speak appropriately.
All of these different varieties of modern hearing aids depend on power in order to be effective and so it is the miniaturization of batteries which have made them possible. In the case of the two varieties which fit in the ear though, miniaturization of the receivers, amplifiers and speakers is also essential. The behind the ear variety of hearing aid relies essentially on the fact that it has been discovered that bone is excellent for transporting sound vibrations and so they pick up those vibrations and pass those vibrations on to the small bones behind the ears. These small bones which are in contact with the skull will then transfer those vibrations to the skull for forward transmission to the brain.
Any of these modern hearing aids are of course a far cry from the hearing aids of the past which consisted of animal ears carved in wood to what are now known as hearing trumpets, due to their shape. The original wood carving type hearing aids are not known as to whether they were effective or not but certainly the hearing trumpets met with a limited success. None of these required miniaturization as they worked on the simple theory that any larger sound, when compressed, becomes louder. The trumpets were often placed with their narrow end in their ear and their wider end towards the source of 6he sound they want to hear.
Unlike the trumpets of former years, today’s hearing aids are not adorned with embellishments for the sake of fashion but are instead made to look as inconspicuous as possible, hence the popularity of the very small, ear canal hearing aids.