BiCROS Hearing Aids | Hearing Aids for Single-Sided Hearing Loss

Hearing Group Founder and CEO Jesse Hidalgo, BC-HIS, and Practice Owner of HG Stillwater & Ponca City Ryian Crenshaw, BC-HIS, explain what you need to know about BiCROS hearing aids in this video.
BiCROS (Bilateral Microphones with Contralateral Routing of Signal) hearing aids are designed for people with little to no hearing in one ear and slightly impaired hearing in the other ear. When patients come into our offices with hearing loss that's significantly worse on one side than the other, they often are under the impression that their "dead ear" can't be used at all or that it's pointless to wear two hearing aids - that's not true! BiCROS set of hearing aids can really make a difference.
If you have a hearing loss on one side that's completely aidable and hearing loss on the other side that's unaidable because of either profound hearing loss or your word recognition being too low, a BiCROS could be for you. Wearing binaural hearing aids when your hearing loss is worse in one ear can actually bring down your ability to understand words in your better ear and make it worse in that ear because of something called binaural degradation.That's one of the number one reasons people think that wearing a hearing aid on both sides is not going to benefit them, but the BiCROS system is different!
If you come in and have one bad or "dead" ear and one good ear and we decide to put you into BiCROS hearing aids, what will happen is that we'll put a transmitter hearing aid on the bad ear and it captures all the sound from that side and transmits it to hearing aid on the good ear. So you're actually wearing two hearing aids, but they're performing in different ways. If someone is talking to you on your bad side, the hearing aid will capture that and send it to the good side so that you don't have to say "huh?" or "what?" or "talk into my good ear!"
If you don't have a Hearing Group near you - don't worry. Most hearing aid manufacturers offer some kind of BiCROS system or their hearing aids can be configured to be a BiCROS inside the technology. Any hearing care professional near you should be able to educate you in regards to CROS and BiCROS hearing aids. A link to our video about CROS hearing aids: • CROS BiCROS Hearing Ai... . Make sure you ask your hearing professional about CROS or BiCROS hearing aids!
One of our favorite manufacturers when it comes to BiCROS hearing aid systems is Unitron. Unitron hearing aids can be configured to be BiCROS hearing aids within the technology which means that if you bought a regular set of Unitron hearing aids and it's later clear that you need to be in a BiCROS system, you don't have to purchase a whole new set of hearing aids because we can convert your Unitron hearing aids into BiCROS.
If you're suffering from single-sided hearing loss or have maybe been told that you're deaf in one ear, we encourage you to go to a hearing professional and ask about BiCROS. If you have any questions or comments for us, please leave them in the comment section below. We'd love to hear from you!
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