Linda had developed pretty significant hearing loss and she needed hearing aids. Modern hearing aids are amazing devices. Tiny, digital, sometimes even hard to tell you're wearing them, and programmable for a multitude of different auditory needs.

Dr. Dennis Hampton, Audiologist: "So, if we knew about that person's hearing, the more we know about the person's hearing, we can put that into the hearing aid and program that hearing aid to adjust to the sound to match that person's hearing."

The key is knowing whether the person spends a lot of time in noisy environments. Or quiet ones, in groups or one-on-one. But that information had to come from a patient's recollection and that's not always accurate.

Enter this little device. The sound activity monitor, or SAM for short. A patient wears it for a few days or a week while it records all the sounds around the patient. Then the audiologist uploads the information into a computer, generating a picture of the patient's sound world.

Dr. Hampton: "This person lives a pretty quiet world, when she's listening to speech it's speech in a quiet setting."

It allowed Dr. Hampton to precisely tailor Linda's hearing aids, not just to her particular hearing loss- but to her sound environment- which frequencies needed boosting, directionality of the microphones in the aids and so on.

As good as hearing aids have become they can't help at all if you don't get them. That means admitting you might have a problem, getting tested and then being fit for an aid.

By Meghan McDermott
http://www.kten.com/Global/story.asp?S=4660702