What are CROS hearing aids?

Some people have very little hearing in one ear, so much that a standard hearing aid will not help. When a sound occurs on the side of your bad ear, your head physically prevents the sound from reaching your good ear, says a hearing aid expert in Kolkata.

Audiologists call this the "head-shadow effect." It affects consonants' hearing and they are important to understand speech. In short, when you can't hear from one ear, it will be hard for you to distinguish "tap" from "cap." This is especially difficult in restaurants and bars, which have become increasingly noisy over time. Background noise is an issue for everyone’s hearing, but it is magnified if you have very little hearing in one ear, a condition known as single-sided deafness (SSD) or unilateral hearing loss.

Many people live with their hearing problems and they may request that people speak to them on their good side. However, this is not a solution. They'll still have difficulty locating a sound source in restaurants or at a noisy event, says the hearing machine expert in Kolkata.

There are, thankfully, options ranging from specialized headphones to hearing aids to surgical implants. When it comes to hearing aids, CROS devices are specifically designed for single-sided deafness.

What exactly is CROS?

The acronym stands for Contralateral Routing of Signals. With a CROS system, you wear hearing aids on both ears, even though you can't hear in one of them. The sound detected by the aid on the "bad ear" side is directly transmitted to the aid on the "good ear" side. This eliminates the "head shadow" effect, says the best ear machine expert in Kolkata.

What distinguishes CROS from other hearing aids?

Traditional hearing aids send sound into the ear they are sitting on. With a CROS set up, the device on the non-hearing ear looks like a traditional hearing aid, but it is a microphone and transmitter and is picking up the sound to send it to the device on the hearing ear.

The disadvantages of CROS hearing aids

CROS hearing aids take some time getting used to, and it's important to understand that they won't solve all of a person's hearing problems. They do not, for example, improve the "localization" of sound—a person may still be unable to determine where a sound is coming from. This can be especially aggravating in an environment with a lot of background noise, says the hearing aid expert in Kolkata.