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Comment by fallingfrog | Hacker News Reader

I’m surprised that 30 decibels is considered mild hearing loss. Every 6 decibels is roughly a halving of sound pressure so if you have 30 decibels of loss you’re hearing 1/32 of the sound that a person without any hearing loss would hear. That’s not mild!

This is a very cool project, I wonder if modern hearing aids work in a similar way- by tuning their response to the person wearing them?

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I have age related hearing loss with 30db at low frequency and 65db at high frequency. Surprisingly you can't tell you lost that much if it happen gradually. You just don't realize you no longer hear the birds chirping or the computer fan running. Eventually you realize you have a hard time understanding people and ask them to repeat words. When you get hearing aids you realize your brain has been trying to compensate for this hearing loss. You relied on lip movements and context more. Suddenly everything sounds much louder with hearing aids. But over time your brain adapts back.

> I wonder if modern hearing aids work in a similar way- by tuning their response to the person wearing them?

I have a basic model provided free by the (UK) NHS. It is tuned to my audiogram by my NHS audiologist.

More sophisticated models do a lot of tailoring, both to the person and to the environment. By way of example:

https://wdh02.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon-us/main/download-...

"Mild" in contrast to "severe". With a 30dB loss, you can still hear the louder noises, speech, etc. I have a 30dB loss in the mid range in one ear, just where it matters for speech. I can hear and understand people pretty well, but fail when they are whispering, or when they are speaking something else than my native language in a noisy environment. On the positive side: if I sleep on my good ear, a lot of the background noise disappears.

I am 41 and I can still hear tones out to about 17khz. Spent a lot of time in rock shows in my 20’s too. If I knew what I had done right I’d put it in a bottle and sell it. Probably time will catch up to me too in a few years.

Hearing aids have been doing this for 20+ years. The big players in the market have been fine-tuning their algorithms and hardware for a long time to be able to fit even severe hearing losses with a good sound. Modern aids also very impressive with sound localisation and context-switching between people speaking in groups.

Edit: That's not to say this isn't a cool project, it is VERY cool.

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