The demand side of the main consideration of the daily habits of the elderly, usually do what activities, the sound environment is a quieter environment, or more noisy environment. For example, if an elderly person's daily routine is to buy groceries, cook, do housework, and watch TV, the main range of activities at home, in the neighborhood, and other quiet environments, then the functional requirements of hearing aids will be simpler, and some of the economic type of hearing aids will be able to solve the problem. If the elderly retirement life is more colorful, daily living environment will be more complex, the requirements of hearing aids will be higher, such as on the senior university, from time to time, old classmates, old friends gatherings, go out to play and so on. This requires hearing aids to have more features to meet the listening in noisy environments, in order to let him/her in these environments both comfortable, but also hear clearly. In this case, a mid-range or even high-end hearing aid is needed. The price will naturally be high.
Another factor to consider is the physical condition of the elderly. Mainly to see whether the elderly will affect the hearing of chronic diseases, such as hypertension, high blood pressure, high blood fat, diabetes and so on, these will lead to a faster decline in hearing, the choice of hearing aids to reserve more power or choose to replace the different power horn hearing aids to meet the constant lower limit of the hearing needs; there is also the old man has no presbyopia, cataracts, finger inflexibility and other conditions, which affects the old man independently operate the hearing aids, the ability to establish the selection of the back-of-the-ear type of hearing aid. Ability to establish the selection of back-of-the-ear hearing aids or receiver (speaker) external hearing aids (in fact, also back-of-the-ear hearing aids, but smaller than the traditional back-of-the-ear, better hidden), this type of hearing aids are more conducive to the operation of the elderly. These factors determine the shape of the hearing aid.
Another point to add is that studies have shown that the elderly (with or without hearing loss) have a poorer ability to distinguish and respond to sound as their bodies deteriorate with age. If you wear hearing aids, it is recommended that you choose hearing aids that use slow compression technology (there are two types of compression technology in hearing aids, one is slow compression and the other is fast compression). Slow compression technology preserves the speech envelope, which simply means that the sound is better reproduced and (compared to fast compression technology) is more conducive to improving speech intelligibility. It can be helpful for the elderly, children and people with auditory neuropathy. You can go to a hearing center to find out which brands/series of hearing aids use slow compression. As far as I know, all Danish Viva Hearing products use slow compression.
Choosing a hearing aid for an elderly person can be done by visiting several hearing centers, learning about and auditioning different brands, not only to hear, but also to hear clearly and comfortably.