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Catching a cold can play havoc with your ears’ sensitivity to particular frequencies. And this can be especially annoying for those who use modern digital hearing aids, because they are pre-programmed to boost sound only at frequencies that the person normally has difficulty hearing. But the North Dakota State University Research Foundation in Fargo is promising to tackle the problem (WO 02/088993). With NDSU’s system, the person is tested by a professional while healthy and the results are stored in a home PC. When they catch a cold, they simply listen to test tones from the PC to create a temporary frequency profile. This is downloaded to the hearing aid via an infrared link.