Hearing aids have volume controls, which some clinicians disable for new users - as it causes more problems than it fixes.

And just like the TV remote they increase all sounds - good (speech) and bad (music and explosions).

The issue is not just "is it loud enough" but rather, "can you understand what you want to hear when you want to hear it?"

imagine yourself at a busy restaurant. you want to hear your spouses speach better, and the wait staff- but turning their speech up also turns up the people you do not want to hear.

how do you fix that?

noise reduction, speech enhancement, directional microphones are just some of the tools a hearing aid uses.

But ultimately what needs to happen is your brain works harder at comprehending what you want to hear(yes, it is work, and like all work people do not want to do it).

So they think...hmmm, I will just pay $xxxx.xx and I wont have to work anymore.

Reminds me of the race to the bottom we're also seeing in orthodontics.

Whether like me, you never got the hang of a retainer after braces - or went off braces too soon, in my case - there has been a number of companies trying to get costs down and make the process less expensive and onerous.

Yet, talking to my regular dentist, who has used Invisalign with patients before, it's not the fact that there are more competitors in the field, essentially putting pressure on the DMD's and others to up their game, it's that after the initial consult, the entire process is (largely) unsupervised.

If you don't fit (or tune) something like this properly, it doesn't work.

A lot of the time it's not absolute volume. If you can't hear certain frequency ranges well, boosting the volume of all ranges is just going to drown out the ones you can't hear well.

Exactly - hearing is much more complicated than just noise sensitivity. For example, a somewhat underdiagnosed problems is issue with the frequency bins that the brain segments sound into for recognition deteriorating. Symptoms are - can hear just fine in a nice, uncluttered audio environment, say a test centre, but has issues if there is any significant background noise.

> Symptoms are - can hear just fine in a nice, uncluttered audio environment, say a test centre, but has issues if there is any significant background noise.

Also a problem if you're not a native speaker. I am fluent in English and have been able to watch movies without subtitles for 20 years at least, probably more.

But put me in a noisy bar and my error correction suffers a lot. Suddenly it's hard to follow a conversation that in my native language would be effortless.

The worst situation is listening to a loud video on bad speakers. Doesn't matter how much you crank the volume, people are hard to understand because the brain's error correction isn't good enough. Use a good speaker and turn down the volume, suddenly it's perfect.

Do any hearing aids frequency shift, or compress the frequency scale (e.g. just higher frequencies compressed down to lower frequencies so that voice tone stays constant and sibilants get shifted down into hearing range).

yes, I know Phonak hearing aids were doing that since about 2012. For some of our more severe hearing impaired patients it was a noticeable improvement in speech comprehension.

so a smart volume button

That pays attention to the environment and changes the volume (part of the spectrum perhaps?) that is what you're likely to be listening to.

This is of course a huge oversimplification, and aiming for it is probably what the industry is doing.

That is exactly what the tech does, automatically adjusts based on the amount of noise and speech in the environment. And going a step further, applying directional microphone control to better pick up sounds where the speech is.

go further, and having 'hearing aids' that would let you rewind the last 5-10 seconds of a conversation to hear something again without asking people to repeat themselves...

I think this is more akin of the Android phone I have asking me if the call I just placed was: clear, had cutouts or dropouts, fuzzy background noise ... And they take that feedback and adjust my call quality in GoogleFi (in theory)... It's not just the concept of s volume button, but more the idea of reinforced (ai) learning over time, or algorithm adjustment with human feedback.

Definitely not the same, hearing aids do a lot more signal processing than just amplifying sound.

...which will simply make you more deaf. hearing aids do not simply amplify volume. you know, because they're not headphones and a microphone.

but your idea is great too. if you can't hear one frequency, let's amplify all frequencies till the one you need gets loud enough, and go deaf to the other ones in a year. when you get old and need a hearing aid, you should stick with your method.