When someone gets glasses, a blurry world usually snaps into sharp focus. So it’s no surprise that many new hearing aid users — and their families — expect the same experience: put in the devices, hear normally again. When that doesn’t happen, disappointment follows. Devices end up in drawers. Families grow frustrated. And the expectation gap that caused it all goes largely unaddressed.
As a person with hearing loss and a longtime hearing aid user, I am deeply grateful for my devices. They are remarkable tools, and I would not want to live without them.
But gratitude and honesty can coexist: hearing aids do not work like glasses, and the hearing care industry needs to do a better job of saying so — clearly, early, and often.
The Expectation Gap
Even with sophisticated processing — compression, directional microphones, AI noise reduction — hearing aids do not restore normal hearing. For many users, speech remains somewhat muffled, particularly in noisy environments. This is the origin of the phrase every hearing care professional has heard: “I can hear that people are speaking, but I can’t understand them.”
Hearing aids also struggle to differentiate among sounds. In a noisy restaurant, they may boost the conversation at the next table, and the clatter of cutlery in addition to the speech sounds that matter. AI-driven noise management is improving this — genuinely and rapidly — but the problem is not solved.
When patients expect restoration and receive assistance, they experience the assistance as failure.
And when families expect their loved one to “hear perfectly,” every communication breakdown is evidence that the person isn’t trying, or that the expensive hearing devices don’t work.
Supplemental Technologies Help Devices Perform Better
The solution is honest expectation-setting at the point of care and in industry marketing. Patients fitted with realistic expectations — hearing aids improve speech comprehension, especially in quiet, but are not sufficient in every situation — are set up to succeed.
They are also more open to exploring additional technology tools to help fill the gaps. Things like:
- Remote microphones, which bring distant voices directly into the devices — ideal for lectures, meetings, and loud restaurants.
- Speech-to-text apps, which create captioning from spoken language in real time. Most apps are free, and even with occasional errors, they are enormously helpful.
- Sound alert features, many built into phone operating systems, that flag doorbells, alarms, and running water.
- Venue-based accommodations like CART and hearing loops. I had never heard of either before attending my first hearing loss convention — a missed opportunity that keeps people away from lectures, theater, and the movies for years longer than necessary.
- And Auracast — broadcast audio that lets one transmitter reach many receivers simultaneously, whether hearing aids, earbuds, or headphones. Auracast may be the first hearing accessibility technology whose success depends on everyone wanting it — not just people with hearing loss. And as people with typical hearing start demanding it in theaters and meeting halls, people with hearing loss will benefit the most.
Devices are Just One Leg of the Stool
In Hear & Beyond: Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss, Gael Hannan and I describe skillful living with hearing loss as a three-legged stool: Technology, MindShifts, and Communication Behaviors. Technology is essential — but it is one leg, not the whole stool. Hearing aids work best when supported by realistic attitudes and practical communication strategies.
A patient who understands that devices are powerful-but-partial tools will use them more consistently, supplement them more creatively, and communicate more successfully than one who expects the equivalent of glasses and quietly concludes the devices have failed.
Hearing aids aren’t like glasses. They’re communication tools. The sooner the industry says so, the more patients will get from them.
Shari Eberts is a passionate hearing health advocate and internationally recognized author and speaker on hearing loss issues. She is the founder of Living with Hearing Loss, a popular blog and online community for people with hearing loss, and an executive producer of We Hear You, an award-winning documentary about the hearing loss experience. Her book, Hear & Beyond: Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss, (co-authored with Gael Hannan) is the ultimate survival guide to living well with hearing loss. Shari has an adult-onset genetic hearing loss and hopes that by sharing her story, she will help others to live more peacefully with their own hearing issues. Connect with Shari: Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.
