Hearing Aid Open Fitting: What Does That Mean?
Many are confused by the term “open fitting” in relation to their hearing. The term “open fitting” is describing how the feeling would be when you are wearing your hearing aid. You want an open, not an occluded or plugged up, feeling.
Open fittings are used when a patient has a high frequency hearing loss. This means that they hear most of the lower tones in a normal range. With this type of loss, fitting the hearing aid with any mold that occludes or fills up the ear canal would, in most cases, prevent the wearer from hearing the low tones. This causes your voice to sound hollow or you would get a plugged up feeling, like when you talk with your nose plugged up.
To prevent this from occurring we would only put a small tip in or use a large vented mold to allow the natural sounds to enter the canal and use the amplification of the hearing aid to amplify the high frequencies that needed to be amplified. The results would be a very natural sound quality. And because we have left the ear canal as open as possible, we call this fitting an Open Fitting.
If, however, you have hearing loss in the low tones this type of fitting would not provide the correction needed. When you amplify low tones with an open fitting the lows roll off do to the venting. You will get high frequency amplification. However, people’s voices just will lack the strength or volume.
This is why with all HearPod hearing aids we send two sets of silicone pillows, one set is vented and the other set is non-vented. It only takes a few minutes to try the different vented and non-vented pillows to find which one provides the best and most natural hearing for your hearing loss.
With our advanced technology we can almost always provide amplified sound that sounds natural and is extremely effective.
