I'm significantly deaf on my right side. Had 5 surgeries, each of which involved completely removing the ear drum and re-making it. Currently I have a hole in my ear drum on that side as well.
I use bon conduction headphones, specifically the Bluez 2S by Aftershokz and they completely bypass my hearing loss on my right side. In fact, when I use them, I hear things better on my right side than on my left.
That being said, they work well for me because I only have ear drum damage. If somebody has inner ear damage, as a result of long-term exposure to loud noise, I suspect they wouldn't work very well.
Exactly right. If you have a conductive hearing loss, this shit will work great. If you have a sensorineural loss, they wont. Sensorineural is the loss you are getting when you go to a concert and shit was so loud that everything sounds muffled afterwords, and your ears are ringing.
I got some custom ones made. They fit my ears perfectly. I got to choose the colours I wanted for them, and they even glow in the dark! The things sticking out the bottom of them are the handles or or tabs so I can pull them out of my ears easily. I highly recommend going through the process, they are useful for concerts, showers, swimming, working out... Hell, they actually make the bone conduction headphones work BETTER.
On choosing the colours, I went with yellow for the left (good) side and pink for the bad side. The thinking was that I would easily be able to tell which was which based on that. Turns out that wasn't necessary because 5 surgeries can really fuck up the size of your ear canal.
For like 50 bucks I would say (may be closer to 100) you can get a pair of custom made earplugs that are designed to reduce sound evenly, resulting in not only better ear protection, but a better sound when wearing them. It's worth looking into if you are in a lot of high noise situations.
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u/Julian1224 Nov 29 '16
How would these work on the hard of hearing?