Maybe some of you have come up with someone you know who has SSD, or perhaps you yourself have SSD. It is NOT unusual because, according to one study*, it is estimated that more than 7% of adults in the U.S. have a certain degree of SSD!!

To most people, this number might be beyond imagination. Some might say there are not many people with SSD around them. However, even though you think none of your acquaintances have SSD, it does not mean that they actually do not have SSD.

Unlike people with bilateral hearing loss whose ears are both impaired, people with SSD can hardly be distinguished in daily lives because they act and speak normally. Besides, In fact, many of people with SSD are reluctant to tell others about their symptoms. Some people say it is hard to talk about SSD, even to their best friend. The reason for this may be because SSD is not fully recognized by many people.

*Goman, A. M., & Lin, F. R. (2016). Prevalence of Hearing Loss by Severity in the United States. American journal of public health, 106(10), 1820–1822. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303299

Among all the problems people with SSD have, what they are suffering from most is the inability to tell speech in noisy situations. In social situations like parties, they are really struggling to hear what others say, and sometimes miss words spoken to them.

People with SSD are always at risk of ignoring someone calling or talking to them. To avoid it in social situations like parties, they try to do what few things they can, like sitting at a certain corner of the table so that voices of all other people come from the angle they can hear. Sadly, however, these are not enough. Many people with SSD recognize this but can do nothing more, feeling sorry for the people around them.

Where does the speech recognition problem people with SSD have come from?

There are some reasons why humans have two ears.

• Left ear catches sound from the left side, and the right ear catches sound from the right side more efficiently. Having two ears enables us to listen to sound coming from a wide range of angles.

• When listening to a weak sound source, sounds arrived at two ears are summed up so that the wearer of asEars can hear more clearly.

• Sound localization ability is increased using two ears. Imagine stereo audio recordings. By just using two microphones when recording, the information where the sound came from is preserved pretty well.

• Our brains make use of two ears in order to selectively listen to what we want to listen (e.g., speech) and filter out unwanted sound.

Losing hearing from one ear means that all these features of our ears become completely or partially unavailable. In fact, people with SSD have more difficulty listening to speech in noisy situations than many people think.