The changing of the seasons doesn’t just mean that it’s time to refresh your wardrobe; it’s also a great time to visit your audiologist for some subtle changes to your hearing aid settings, as well. Maine’s late-spring weather creates a unique mix of environmental factors that can affect how your hearing aids perform.
Moist Air
Late spring features high humidity, regular rainfall and coastal fog, meaning that there’s a lot of moisture in the air. We talk a lot about how humidity can impact your hearing aids physical health and battery life, and that’s an important discussion. What doesn’t get talked about as much is how the moist air can change how sound reaches your ears. That moisture can absorb and scatter sound, reducing its sharpness.
You may experience sound dampening, which makes things sound slightly muffled and less crisp, especially when listening to speech. This phenomenon is somewhat mild, but that doesn’t mean that you should simply roll with it.
We can adjust your hearing aids to accommodate this seasonal change by fine-tuning high-frequency amplification, adjusting compression settings to maintain clarity, and upping speech enhancement.
Fluctuating Temperatures
This time of year is characterized by cool mornings and warmer afternoons, which might facilitate a lot of movement on your part throughout the day. Perhaps you spend the morning at home, enjoying a nice, quiet breakfast, but then move on to a busy afternoon itinerary visiting with friends and running errands.
As opposed to winter, when listening programs trended toward quieter environments, spring has you moving from indoor to outdoor and from busy to still frequently throughout the day. All these different acoustic environments demand different things from your hearing aids.
We can help with this by activating more specialty listening programs for the varied soundscapes and by checking the smart environment adjustment capabilities of your devices.
Wind
Seasonal changes mean barometric pressure shifts, which means wind, especially in a coastal state like Maine. Wind noise can be a real nuisance for hearing aid users. The air blowing onto the microphone and the turbulence created around the shapes of your ear create a loud, incessant whooshing sound that is annoying and drowns out the noises around you.
Modern hearing aids are equipped with advanced sound processing that is good at stopping sound phenomena like feedback and wind noise, but on especially gusty days, they may still pose challenges.
Ask your audiologist about your wind noise reduction features and make sure they’re working adequately.
The Lush Landscape
Thanks to rainfall and warming temperatures, spring in Maine is lush and beautiful. This makes for a pleasant walk through Glen Cove Park, but it also slightly changes the soundscape. There’s more ambient sound in nature now, from rustling leaves to buzzing insects to the birds singing.
This ambiance can be very pleasant, but it’s worth ensuring it doesn’t create a busy sound environment that makes listening more complicated.
To combat this effect, we can increase ambient noise filtering and refine speech-in-noise settings so your devices focus more on speech over environmental noise.
Professional Year-Round Care
At Gary D. Schwartzberg, Au.D., Doctor of Audiology, we want to make sure you’re getting the best listening experience from your hearing aids year-round. We often say that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to hearing, and usually we mean that no two people have the same hearing needs, but that also applies to a single individual’s hearing needs throughout the year. Come see us this spring to get the most out of your hearing aids, and enjoy Maine’s pleasant late spring.