Are There Face Masks for People with Hearing Aids?
Are There Face Masks for People with Hearing Aids?
The COVID-19 pandemic has set fresh challenges for people with hearing difficulties. Facemasks with strings looping around ears can dislodge hearing aids when removed, and leave them dangling, or worse.
The ones with pairs of tie strings are not much better because the upper ones can also snag the tubes. It’s a double whammy for people with spectacles that keep misting up with moisture. It’s a fact of life face masks, hearing aids and spectacles just don’t work well together.
So here we are in the middle of a pandemic with reading glasses, spectacles, and face masks all fighting over scarce space behind our ears. We sent our researcher out to investigate. What they found reconfirmed face masks, hearing aids and spectacles don’t work well together.
There Aren’t Too Many Places to Hook the Elastic Loop for Your Face Mask
The best face masks, medically speaking are those that hook around our ears with elastic loops. This ensures they hold the mask securely without gaps for droplets to pass the edges. Unfortunately, these hearing aids and facemasks just love tangling together.
And if our hearing aid tubes are working loose, we could drop one from behind our ear onto a hard surface and damage it. Your best workaround could be purchasing a pair of affordable hearing aids from Blue Angels for under $200. That way you won’t risk weeping buckets of tears while removing your face mask absent-mindedly.
This set us to thinking there has to be a face mask for hard of hearing people, what with all the money going into research. We’ll keep looking. Meanwhile we do have two suggestions for face masks for deaf people although they are from ideal.
Are Face Mask Extenders Right for People With Sensitive Ears?
Face mark extenders are clips at the backs of our heads onto which the loops of facemasks clip. We should imagine this makes the mask fit tighter, although we did find a few that are adjustable to soften the impact.
However, these don’t qualify as masks for people with hearing aids in our minds. That’s because they only try to work around the problem instead of solving it. When we tried a few out, we discovered the clip had to be at the top or bottom of the back of our head. Or else it kept snagging the hearing aid.
This didn’t really solve the problem for us, because the clip tended to shift to the middle of our head after a while. We decided mask extenders were probably never intended to be face masks for hard of hearing people. Perhaps their market is folks with sensitive skin, that don’t like anything touching their ears.
Are Tie-On Cloth Face Masks the Answer for Deaf People?
When we phoned about we found many of our clients were using cloth masks with tie strings. They explained they like to be able to adjust the tie tag tension. And they were comfortable when they had the upper tie at the top of the back of their head away from their hearing aids.
Unfortunately, there are three problems with this approach, as far our understanding goes.
1. We found the upper tie tag slipped out of position quite easily
2. The mask tended to pull away from our mouth unless we were careful
3. This ‘solution’ therefore reduced the effectiveness of the face mask
Where to Search for a Face Mask for Deaf People?
We are therefore unable to recommend either of those two options as solutions for the hearing aids face mask dilemma. We had no success with face masks that extended over our ears either. That’s because they partly blocked out the sounds we were struggling to hear.
Bandanas were a slight improvement, although we could not find the ideal balance between letting through sound versus keeping the virus in check. The best option we know could be sewing a hand-made face mask along these lines which is less likely to snag.
Nobody appeared to be making these masks for people with hearing aids commercially, at least at the time of writing. But we hope our article inspires someone to do so soon.
How to Safely Remove Hearing Aids During the Pandemic
We noticed an uptick in orders after the lock down began. We wondered whether this was because the internet had become the only safe source of supply. Or was it because couples were spending more quality time together at home?
We believe it’s a mixture of those two factors, but linked to more hearing aids coming to harm after accidentally falling into liquid, or onto hard surfaces. Here’s how to avoid this by disentangling a hearing aid safely. And not having to order a new pair of hearing aids for the promotional price of under $200 including shipping.
- Check carefully with your fingers if you can release one side of the facemask
2. Remove that side if you can, if not hopefully the other side will come free
3. If not, the offending tie has probably slipped under the hearing aid. Try to free it.
4. If that does not work, remove the hearing aid and tie in one operation
5. If both ties are tangled, then ask some to help you resolve the problem
Other Articles You Might Like.
