The Signia Active Pro IX in their charging case. Signia/ZDNETHearing aids are a vital piece of accessibility technology. According to the FDA, almost 30 million adults in the US experience a degree of hearing loss. Despite that prominent figure, only one-fifth of those people choose to address their hearing loss with hearing devices and aids.Some people may be turned off by hearing aids due to societal stigmas stemming from their historically bulky and unfashionable appearance. Signa hopes to turn the tide with the Signia Active Pro IX and Active IX hearing aids. They are consumer earbuds that double as prescription-grade hearing aids for people who want to enhance their hearing while maintaining a low profile.Also: Apple’s AirPods Pro might be an inexpensive solution to your hearing lossThe Active Pro IX use Signia’s proprietary Integrated Xperience hearing platform to help those with hearing loss remain active participants in everyday conversation. According to Signia, the hearing platform uses Signia’s RealTime Conversation Enhancement solution, which can process up to four focus streams.A focus stream refers to how the hearing aids focus on sounds coming from the front of the wearer. The hearing aids then use augmentation to enhance conversational noises from all directions while reducing extraneous background noises.Also: AirPods Pro reportedly will gain a hearing aid mode with iOS 18 – no hardware update neededSignia’s new hearing aids can process multiple voices within a conversation, helping users stay immersed in all subsets of a conversation, a challenge many hearing aid wearers experience, according to Signia.A Signia study found that the Integrated Xperience platform produced a +12dB signal-to-noise ratio in simulated group conversations. This positive decibel level means that the technology makes the hearing aids’ signal 12 times stronger than the imitated background noise, allowing wearers to distinguish speech over background noise better. More