Keep your eyes on the road. Naturally, it’s good advice, but it doesn’t speak to your other senses. Your ears, for example, are doing tons of work when you’re driving, helping you monitor other vehicles, calling your attention to info on your dashboard, and keeping you connected with the other people in your vehicle.
So when you experience hearing impairment, the way you drive can vary. That’s not to say your driving will become prohibitively dangerous. With regards to safety, inexperience and distracted driving are much greater liabilities. Still, some special safeguards should be taken by individuals with hearing loss to ensure they continue driving as safely as possible.
Hearing loss can affect your situational awareness but developing safe driving habits can help you stay safe while driving.
How your driving could be effected by hearing loss
Generally, driving is a vision-centered activity (at least, if it’s not a vision-centric activity, something’s wrong). Even full-blown hearing loss probably won’t keep you from driving, but it very likely might change how you drive. After all, you use your hearing quite a bit while you’re driving. Some typical examples include:
- Your hearing will often alert you when your car has some kind of malfunction. If your engine is knocking or you have an exhaust leak, for instance.
- Other drivers will often use their horns to make you aware of their presence. If you fail to see the light turn to green, for example, or you start to drift into the other lane, a horn can alert you before it becomes an issue.
- Audible alerts will sound when your vehicle is attempting to alert you to something, like an unbuckled seat belt or an open door.
- You can usually hear emergency vehicles before you can see them.
- Even though most vehicles are engineered to decrease road noise, your sense of hearing can raise your awareness of other vehicles. For instance, you will normally be able to hear a large truck coming toward you.
All of these audio cues can help build your overall situational awareness. As your hearing loss gets worse, you might be missing more and more of these cues. But there are measures you can take to ensure you stay as safe as you can while driving.
Developing new safe driving habits
It’s no problem if you want to keep driving even after you have hearing loss! Here are a few ways you can be certain to remain safe while driving:
- Check your mirrors more often: Even with sirens blaring, you may not hear that ambulance coming up behind you. So be vigilant about checking your mirrors. And generally try to keep an elevated awareness for emergency vehicles.
- Minimize in-car noises: Hearing loss is going to make it hard for your ears to differentiate noises. It will be easy for your ears to become overstimulated and for you to get distracted if you have passengers loudly talking and music playing and wind in your ears. So when you’re driving, it’s a good idea to decrease the volume on your radio, keep conversation to a minimum, and roll up your windows.
- Keep your phone stowed: Well, this is wise advice whether you suffer from hearing loss or not. Phones are among the leading causes of distraction on the road today. And with hearing loss that distraction is at least twice as much. You will simply be safer when you put away your phone and it could save your life.
- Keep an eye on your instrument panel: usually, when you need to give attention to your instrument panel, your vehicle will beep or make some other sound. So you’ll want to make sure you glance down (when it’s safe) and confirm your turn signals aren’t still on, or you don’t have a check engine light on.
How to keep your hearing aid ready for driving
Driving is one of those tasks that, if you have hearing loss, a hearing aid can really help. And there are several ways you can be certain your hearing aid is a real advantage when you’re driving:
- Wear your hearing aid every time you drive: It’s not going to help you if you don’t use it! So make sure you’re using your hearing aids every time you drive. By doing this, your brain will have an easier time getting used to the incoming signals.
- Keep your hearing aids clean, updated, and charged: When you’re on your way to the store, the last thing you want is for your battery to die. That can be distracting and possibly even dangerous. So keep your batteries charged and make sure everything’s working properly.
- Ask us for a “driving” setting: We can program a car setting into your hearing aid if you do a lot of driving. The size of the interior of your vehicle and the fact that your passengers will be talking to you from the side or rear will be the factors we will use to optimize this “car setting” for smoother safer driving.
Hearing loss doesn’t mean driving is a problem, particularly with hearing aids which make it easier and safer. Establishing safer driving habits can help ensure that your drive is pleasant and that your eyes remain safely on the road.
