Hearing aids have advanced a long way since the early models which resembled square box transistor radios that people strapped to their chest and had two wires traveling up to their ears. These hearing aids of olden collected sounds but not very well and did not decipher between noises and voices at all.

Today, there are digital hearing aids which are practically invisible because they are worn in the ear canal and if someone has longer hair, no one will know that a person is wearing the hearing device. There is also the bone-in implant in which a surgical procedure is performed and a hole is cut inside the ear canal to which a wire is attached and it travels up and out of the ear to the implant which is put on the outside of the ear. These are called cochlear implants and resemble a large snap like one might find on a piece of clothing. Not everyone with a hearing impairment is eligible for a cochlear implant, those with nerve deafness would not benefit from a one of these implants. However, many children in the early stages of hearing loss do qualify for a cochlear implant.

A hearing aid comes in several different styles, there is the in the canal (ITC); in the ear (ITE); completely in the canal (CIC) and behind the ear (BTE) and each of these styles can make the most of speech at a comfortable volume based on an individual’s specific hearing loss. These hearing aids are manufactured in analog or digital and depending on what an audiologist recommends, a hearing impaired person could hear far greater than ever before with the latest technology in a small package.

Most of the hearing aids are made of a molded plastic and come in a light brown or tan color. Although, for younger hearing impaired people, such as ‘tweens’ and teenagers, there is a hearing aid manufacturing company that had enlisted the help of some top name artists and come up with some very stylish behind the ear hearing aids to show off their individual style. From a distance these trendy and stylish hearing aids resemble a Bluetooth headset.