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Bustling restaurants provide the ultimate real-world hearing challenge. As diners swap stories, their voices compete with the chatter of other tables, the clatter of dishes, and a smattering of background music that creeps into the foreground. It’s the perfect recipe to overwhelm someone with hidden hearing loss—a poorly understood condition that makes communicating in noisy environments a frustrating ordeal.
A new wave of consumer wearable technologies aims to help people with hidden or mild to moderate high-frequency hearing loss who are not good candidates for traditional hearing aids. For example, Sennheiser’s Conversation Clear Plus looks like and can act just like a regular pair of sleek true wireless earbuds that handle calls and stream content, complete with multiple sizes of eartips and ear fin stabilizers as you’d find with any standard consumer electronics. However, this personal sound amplification product also offers speech enhancement, automatic scene detection, and active noise cancellation technology so wearers can fully participate in everyday conversations without missing a beat.
“There’s a gap we try to fill: reaching people who have an issue but there’s not really a solution for it yet. They may not be ready for hearing aids due to stigma or just not feeling that it’s for them yet,” said Laura Jagoda, a psychologist specializing in speech perception and Conversation Clear Plus product manager.
Unlike traditional hearing loss where sounds become inaudible, hidden hearing loss makes distinguishing speech from background noise difficult. The condition is hard to diagnose, and many people with hidden hearing loss may pass standard hearing tests—myself included, as…
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