Directional Hearing Aids

Rather than providing directional hearing as the name implies, this feature simply lessens the sounds from the side and rear direction. In a noisy environment this can be very useful by removing unwanted sounds and letting you concentrate on the sounds and voices that are facing your direction. However, if the unwanted sound is also coming from the direction you are trying to listed, the feature is less effective. Many studies have shown that directional microphones can significantly improve speech understanding in noisy situations by as much as 40 percent.

For directional microphones to work effectively they must have a minimum physical separation. For this reason they are only a feature of the larger hearing aids rather than the completely-in-canal (CIC) models. The newer digital hearing aids often come with the directional microphone feature built-in.