Face masks have been a great thing when it comes to helping prevent the spread of COVID-19. But they present challenges when trying to communicate with others. Especially if you or the person you’re communicating with has hearing loss.
Face masks muffle speech and block important lip-reading cues. Both are key to understanding speech. Add in social distancing or group video chats — which have nothing to do with masks but plenty to do with speech audibility — and the pandemic has definitely made it a lot harder to hear what friends, family members, colleagues, doctors and dentists, and the cashier scanning your groceries are saying.
Hearing aids make hearing easier
It should be no surprise, though, that hearing aids offset these challenges and can help make it easier to hear people who are wearing face masks. By their very nature, hearing aids amplify sound which, in many cases, is all it takes to hear what face-mask wearers are saying.
Starkey’s Livio Edge AI hearing aids can help even more. Our hearing aids have been engineered to go above and beyond simple sound amplification to specifically tackle the challenges created by face masks, social distancing and background noise.
They include our proprietary Edge Mode technology which has been proven to be highly effective in resolving speech intelligibility issues caused by masks.
How? By putting the power of artificial intelligence (AI) at your fingertips.
Just a double tap of your hearing aids activates Edge Mode anytime you need it. Once activated, Edge Mode scans the acoustic environment you’re in, then instantly optimizes sound — taking masks, distance and background noise into consideration — to deliver enhanced speech audibility on demand.
Not only is Edge Mode great for masks, it's handy to have anytime you encounter a noisy or particularly challenging listening environment.
Our new Mask Mode, too, was specifically designed to make people who are wearing masks easier to hear. Mask Mode is a custom memory in our Thrive app that offsets the loss of speech audibility due to face masks by boosting sound in the affected regions.
Livio Edge AI custom hearing aids are the ideal hearing aid for today
If you really want the ideal hearing solution for today’s mask wearing times, you’ll want our Livio Edge AI custom rechargeable hearing aids. Not only do they help make hearing easier — thanks to Edge Mode and more — but because they fit in your ear and not behind them, they won’t get tangled or pulled off when you’re wearing or removing your face mask.
Did we mention they’re rechargeable?
Listen, COVID-19 has made pretty much everything harder. You owe it to yourself to at least make hearing information, music, conversation partners and the things you love easy. Book a hearing health appointment today and give them a try.