BOSTON -- They are not your grandmother's hearing aids. The latest high-tech hearing aids are discreet devices that come in different colors and different sizes. Some are as small as a quarter.

“There’s a lot of options out there,” said Debbie Essig, who suffers from hearing loss.

Essig had to decide which device was best for her recently. She started to lose her hearing at 55. It affected her entire life and made her job at Massachusetts General Hospital very difficult.

“A lot of what I do as a clinical social worker is listen to people. And if people are telling you things out of context, you can't make sense of it,” Essig said. ”I couldn't understand the words that people were saying.”

Essig is like half of all Americans between 45 and 64 years old who have hearing loss. But many are resistant to getting a hearing aid. In fact, according to the National Institutes of Health only one in five people who need a hearing aid use one.

“A lot of people that the marketing push is targeting is the baby boomers who are having trouble in business meetings and stuff like that,” said Dr. Chris Halpin, an audiologist for Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Halpin said hearing aids have come a long way. The devices are small and come in just about any color. Some even connect to your cell phone or GPS.

“They're designed to directly broadcast to your hearing aid,” he said.

While Halpin said the engineering behind the devices is top-notch, he admits they are not for people with severe hearing loss.

“They work well and reliably for people with very mild hearing loss,” he said. “There are some limits to the acoustics of what you can do with a very small hearing aid.”

Essig’s hearing aid is not the smallest on the market, but she says it doesn't matter because it works for her.

“I don't have to keep asking, 'what did you say'?” she said.