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About 36 million Americans suffer from some type of hearing loss. However, only one in five who could benefit from a hearing aid actually wears one, according to the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders. MIT engineers believe that number could be boosted if there were a better way to fit hearing aids to the wearers’ ears.Getting useful sound amplification from a hearing aid depends on a tight fit between hearing aid and ear canal, but the current method of modeling patients’ ears is messy and not always accurate, potentially leading to a device that fits poorly and offers little benefit.“A lot of people with hearing aids are likely walking around with hearing aids that don’t fit, because they don’t know what they’re supposed to feel like,” says Douglas Hart, MIT professor of mechanical engineering.Hart has patented a new way of scanning the ear canal with 3-D imaging...