How do I determine what type of hearing instrument is best suited to my hearing loss?

Consumers are faced with a dizzying array of choices when it comes to hearing instrument technology. Marketing materials promote a wide variety of instruments that would appear to solve your problems. It is difficult to choose between the different sizes and the different technologies to determine which ones meet your needs.

The first step in determining which instrument is best for you is to choose a hearing healthcare professional that you are comfortable with. The hearing healthcare professional is an expert on hearing loss and hearing instruments. It is their job to perform testing that provides an accurate diagnosis of your hearing problem. In addition, they go through extensive training to understand the different hearing instruments and their strengths and weaknesses.

Your hearing healthcare professional will do a battery of tests to provide a complete picture of your hearing status. Included is an assessment of your lifestyle and how your hearing loss affects it. The combination of hearing loss and lifestyle determine which hearing instrument technology is most appropriate.


Based upon your test results, the hearing healthcare professional will first recommend appropriate technology. For example, if your are typically in a variety of noisy situations, hearing instruments with directional microphones, such as the GN ReSound Canta7, will be advantageous for you. If you have worn hearing instruments in the past and experienced problems with feedback, then an instrument with digital feedback suppression capabilities would be appropriate. The hearing healthcare professional identifies your needs and matches them to the appropriate technology.

Once the correct technology has been chosen, then the size of the instrument can be discussed. Based upon the features you require to meet your hearing loss needs, the size of the hearing instrument can vary. If you require directional microphones to help understand speech better in background noise, larger hearing instruments are more appropriate. Very small instruments can be cosmetically appealing, but they may lack some of the more advanced features of larger instruments. Manual dexterity plays an important role in choosing the size of the hearing instrument. Larger instruments are typically easier to manipulate and use larger batteries.

Your hearing healthcare professional is the expert on hearing loss and hearing instruments. By doing a proper assessment of your hearing loss and your lifestyle needs, they will be able to prescribe the most appropriate instrument to meet your hearing instrument needs.