Hearing Loss: The Ingenious Use of Bone Anchored Hearing Aids
The advancement of technology is staggering to watch. If you could be an objective observer for a moment – if you could somehow transcend yourself and look at the world from the perspective of someone who didn’t live in the world – what would you see? For one, you would see a world that is changing faster than the people reside in it know what to do. Technology is experiencing exponential growth – the phone today is a million times more powerful than the super computer of the 1960’s – and doesn’t look to stop anytime soon.
One good thing about such fast growth is that other aspects of science, technology and medicine improve even ifthey weren’t set out to be improved in the first place. One such faculty is field of hearing and hearing loss. For generations hearing loss has been detrimental scar on the collective sympathetic driver that many morals are based. In other words, it used to be that people were scared of hearing loss and hearing devices. That has changed with the recent improvement in hearing aid technology. It extends all the way to the sympathy and then extends further into bigger and better things.
One of the best examples of this hearing aid technology growth is through what is known as bone anchored hearing aids. BAHA for short, bone anchored aids are an auditory device that is based on bone conduction. It can be implanted by surgery and primarily for people who don’t have external ear canals. To put it another way, this technology, these devices, are for people who can’t use conventional hearing aids. Consider the fact that hearing aid technology used to have a limit on who it could help with hearing loss and you can see why such strong technological growth is so beneficial.
Other aspects of BAHA include:
Skull Pathway: The BAHA device uses the skull as a pathway. This is done by transferring the sound waves, via vibrations, through the skull and into the inner ear. By doing this it bypasses the canal that has been damaged and goes straight to the source – a very ingenious way to solve the problem.
No Sound to Sound: Some people experience unilateral hearing loss, a type of hearing loss that occurs when one ear is deaf and the other is not. With BAHA, this can be fixed by again transferring sound from the good side to the deaf side via skull conduction.