Inventions
Hearing Aid
Biomedical Engineering
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A hearing aid is a device designed to improve hearing by making sound audible to a person with hearing loss, regulated as a medical device in most countries. Early hearing aids were passive ear trumpets that simply funneled sound into the ear, and the American inventor Miller Reese Hutchison built the first electric hearing aid, the Akouphone, around 1895; Earl Hanson's 1921 Vactuphone was the first commercial model built around vacuum tubes. Hearing aids became fully digital, computerized electroacoustic systems by the 1980s, following work by a team at the Central Institute for the Deaf, and modern digital hearing aids now dominate the market, using signal processing to manage feedback, reduce background noise and improve speech clarity for each wearer's specific hearing loss.
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