How Can You Use Hearing Aids to Increase Your Safety?

Approximately 28.8 million adults in the U.S. could benefit from the use of hearing aids. One of the many benefits hearing aids offer is increased safety awareness. Let’s take a look at a few ways hearing aids can help keep you safe.

Safety at Home

Living with hearing loss can make it easy to miss safety information. Hearing aids can help you hear the critical auditory cues at home, including but not limited to:

Alarms
Doorbells
Dogs barking
Family members calling for help or alerting you to danger
Phone calls
Breaking glass

These examples and more often rely exclusively on auditory information to alert you to danger. Wearing hearing aids at home can give you the information you need to keep you and your family safe in the home.

Many hearing aids come equipped with noise suppression technology and directional microphones to help clarify speech sounds while suppressing unnecessary or irrelevant background noise, helping you hear what you need to hear.

Safety Outdoors

Auditory cues are perhaps even more important outside the home. Public spaces are full of unexpected sounds that convey essential safety information. Whether you need to hear “DUCK” in time to duck out of the way of an errant ball at Pennypacker Park or a siren coming from around the corner, hearing aids can help keep you aware.

Safety When Driving

Driving a car is one of the more dangerous things people do every day. When at the steering wheel, it is important to remain aware of everything around you, including other drivers, road conditions, pedestrians and more. While your eyes do much of the work, your ears are responsible for hearing sirens, tires squealing, brakes slamming and pedestrians yelling. Hearing aids can help ensure you aren’t missing the auditory cues you need to reach your destination safely.

Improving Balance

People with a 25-decibel hearing loss were found to be nearly three times more likely to have a history of falling than those with normal hearing. This likelihood increases by 1.4-fold with each additional 10-decibel loss.

Similar to how you may feel shaky on your feet with your eyes closed, hearing loss can reduce your stability. Hearing aids can help improve your balance by providing important auditory cues to give you a better understanding of the world around you.

For more information on the benefits of hearing aids, contact Advanced ENT & Allergy today to make an appointment with one of our trusted specialists.