Fitting snugly behind the wearer’s ear, the M&RIE – pronounced “Marie” – looks like any other hearing aid. But that’s not the important thing. What’s important is the way it sounds.
Through intelligent design, M&RIE addresses some of the most common pain points of hearing aid wearers, improving clarity in situations with a lot of ambient noise such as crowded restaurants and windy outdoor areas.
Overall, it provides a more natural and less fatiguing listening experience than traditional behind-the-ear hearing aids.
And in doing so, M&RIE can help remove barriers and improve lives, says Karen Hirschausen, principal audiologist of Hearing Australia’s commercial clinical services.
“Hearing aid technology has made significant advances over the past decade,” says Hirschausen. “But this is something quite new and very unique.”
Traditional behind-the-ear hearing aids, as the name suggests, pick up sound via two microphones placed on a device hidden behind the wearer’s ear.
This sound then passes to the ear canal via an earmold or thin tube.
These devices offer the wearer life-changing benefits. But they don’t take advantage of the way the ear’s natural shape is designed to pick up sound.
“You might notice yourself, if you’re having trouble hearing something, by putting your hand behind your ear and actually increasing the size of your ear, you can capture more sound,” Hirschausen says. “And you feel like you hear better, because you’re basically making your ear bigger and catching more sounds.”
Each ear is different, with its own unique bumps and grooves. As people grow, their brains become accustomed to interpreting sound through these shapes.
Audiologists think of it as the “acoustic fingerprint” of an individual.
Because traditional behind-the-ear hearing aids capture sound from a slightly different place, behind the ears, they do not use the natural shape of the ear. As a result, they create an incomplete sound image and it is up to the brain to fill in the gaps. This is why hearing aid wearers can sometimes have difficulty identifying the direction of a sound in noisy environments.
