Do I really need ear moulds for my hearing aids?

Just in the past 6 weeks, I helped two patients who were wearing earmoulds and stopped them right there in the fitting session. Continue reading to learn if you should keep using your BTE hearing aids with earmoulds, or if you should kiss them goodbye.

Why do some patients need an ear mould?

No one is a big fan of earmoulds. Often, they are the most visible part of the hearing aid fitting. Based on one or a few of the following reasons, your audiologist may decide to suggest ear moulds for fitting your hearing aids:

1. Your hearing loss is severe to profound in the low to mid frequencies. In such a case, the hearing aid will pump a lot of energy into your ear canal; often, the seal provided by power domes is not strong enough to stop the sound from leaking out. The result is that the hearing aid starts whistling if fitted with power domes. Depending on the profile of your hearing loss, using feedback-control techniques to reduce the gain of the hearing aid at the scaping frequencies of the sound may work, but might become counter-beneficial as the patient might receive lower than needed gains in some frequencies.

2. Due to the shape of your ear canals, the domes do not stay in your ear canals. We call this a retention problem. It could be due to a very narrow hearing canal or simply the specific shape of your ear canal. After all, not two people have the same ear canal. Ear moulds, in this case, could help retention of the tip of the tube (or receiver) in the ear canal.

3. The patient has difficulty with motor skills. Often, people with dexterity issues or arthritis could benefit from an ear mould as it really helps with the placement and removal of hearing aids.

The patients that I helped were both young, one in her 30s and the other in his 40s. One with bilateral hearing loss, and the other with bilateral hearing loss, both had incidents in childhood resulting in severe hearing loss, and since then, they have been using hearing aids with ear moulds. I also noticed that by the procedure, almost all the NHS hearing aids are fitted with earmoulds for patients with moderate to severe or severe hearing loss.

The simple trick was to try thin tubes with different power and closed domes and try the feedback control to see if there would be any loss in the gain due to feedback control, and if so, how badly it would affect the overall speech spectrum.

Both patients were fitted with the right size and shape power dome, tried the new fitting without earmould for 2 weeks in different soundscapes and at the rehab session decided that this sounds awesome and felt even more awesome!

There are several types of ear moulds that each serve a specific purpose. If you wear an ear mould and are interested in discussing this further or have a question, please leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

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What are alternate options to earmould?

If you have moderate to severe to profound hearing loss and your audiologist has suggested earmould and you are not happy with the earmould then there is good news for you. The industry has offered a few options for stylish, rechargeable ITC and ITE hearing aids that can cover moderate to profound hearing loss.

1. Almost all manufacturers offer rechargeable in-the-ear (ITE) hearing aids for severe and severe to profound hearing loss. Please visit the Severe to Profound collection of hearing aids on our website to browse through ITC and ITC hearing aids.

2. The other alternative is to replace your earmould with a micromould. Almost all RIC (receiver-in-ear) hearing aids can be fitted with UP (Ultra Power) receivers to cover your range of severe and severe to profound hearing loss when fitted with micromoulds. They are neat and almost invisible, and definitely a natural upgrade from the bulky earmoulds. Please see our full article on micromoulds in this article.