When earwax enters the hearing aid tube and receiver, it can cause them to malfunction or stop working completely. Another common reason why the hearing aid has stopped working is that the receiving tube may be clogged. Over time, ear wax can build up and build up in the receiving tube. While routine cleaning is essential to maintaining your hearing aid, even the best intentions can go bad.
Do your best to remove any blockages from the hearing aid and clean it thoroughly. Most hearing aids come with a cleaning kit, so use it to maintain the integrity of the hearing aid. For devices that fit inside the ear, such as devices that go fully into the canal (CIC) or devices that are invisible in the canal (IIC), hearing aids are likely to include replaceable microphone covers. If you don't hear any sound in your headphones, it's important to follow some troubleshooting steps to try to identify where the problem is occurring.
Brad Stewart, audiologist, is the founder and owner of ClearLife Hearing Care in Allen and Lewisville, Texas. In an ear with hidden hearing loss (right panel), the selective degeneration of high-threshold fibers causes a loss of differential sensitivity to changes in amplitude at high sound levels. Tone processing is based on mechanisms in the cochlea and the central auditory areas that are compromised by hearing loss. The amplification and compression provided by OHCs is a form of non-linearity, but it is relatively simple and, at least in theory, can be restored with current hearing aids.
Remember that hearing aids are sensitive electronic devices that spend most of their time in a hot, waxy, and sweaty environment. An ideal hearing aid (bottom row) would transform the word “Hello” into a different sound to restore not only the general level of neural activity, but also the pattern of neuronal activity over time. Many current hearing aids also include additional functions: voice processors, directional microphones, frequency transformations, etc. The combined peripheral and central effects of hearing loss described above result in a distorted neural representation of speech.
Most of the time, this loss of sensation is due to the dysfunction of the OHCs, which can be directly damaged (sensory hearing loss) or be indirectly altered due to the degeneration of the vascular stretch mark, the highly vascularized wall of the cochlea that provides the energy needed to support active amplification (metabolic hearing loss). D) A schematic diagram showing the effects of hidden hearing loss on the signal that the ear sends to the brain. If you do, be sure to quickly replace a wax protector, as the internal components of the hearing aid are now exposed to wax and other debris, which could cause a more serious problem and result in a repair by the manufacturer. Achieving this goal will be challenging, and hearing aids may never be enough for people with serious cochlear damage.
