Imagine being able to fine-tune the volume, treble, and bass on your hearing aids as discretely and effortlessly as checking the time on your wrist. Or picture fine-tuning your hearing aids for any hearing environment without ever having to touch your hearing aids.
Sound too good to be true? A couple of years ago, it was; but with the Apple Watch, hearing aid owners are changing the way they engage with their hearing aids.
With Apple’s most personal device to date, you can now leave your hearing aid remote control at home, your cell phone in your pocket, and your fingers out of your ears. All hearing aid adjustments and settings can be easily accessed from a software program within the watch—meaning you’ll never have to touch your hearing aids or constantly fumble through your cell phone again.
Here are 10 cool things you can do with your Apple Watch and compatible hearing aids.
1. Ditch the hearing aid remote control
The dilemma with modern hearing aids is that as they come to be smaller, more efficient, and furnished with more capabilities, they become more difficult to handle. This makes a remote control a requirement, but who wants to haul around yet another device?
Even using your cell phone as the remote control can get monotonous, but with the Apple Watch, if you want to modify a setting, you just raise your wrist. It can’t get any simpler than that.
2. Easily adjust the volume, treble, and bass
Need the hearing aid volume adjusted? No problem, just inconspicuously lift your wrist, tap the hearing aid app on the watch, and swipe your finger to adjust the volume control slider. You can also quickly fine-tune the treble and bass to build the best sound quality in any listening situation.
3. Mute your hearing aids
Scenarios occur when you don’t want to amplify sound, and with the Apple Watch, you can turn off the hearing aids with the press of a button.
Although we don’t endorse using this feature on your spouse.
4. Create and save custom sound settings
Having a conversation in a restaurant is very different than having a quiet conversation at home; that’s why hearing aids have what are called “environmental presets,” or settings that amplify sounds in accordance to the environment.
With the Apple Watch, you can effortlessly access and change among presets, modifying settings on the fly depending on your location. And as you make your adjustments, if there is a specific setting that works particularly well, you can save the setting, name it, and access it at a later time.
5. Stream music and phone calls
You’re out for a run and you want to listen to your favorite album. That would in general call for you to remove your hearing aids, but with Apple Watch, you can stream music wirelessly from the watch to your hearing aids. In this manner, your hearing aids have the dual purpose of a sound amplification device and a set of high-quality headphones.
Additionally, you can effortlessly answer or forward phone calls straight from the watch, as the audio is delivered wirelessly to your hearing aids not unlike the music.
6. Find your lost hearing aids
We all lose valuable things, like our car keys, and we waste a great deal of time attempting to find them. But when we misplace our hearing aids, it’s not only inconvenient—we risk damaging the mechanism that links us to sound, which can be scary.
Using the Apple Watch, if you lose your hearing aids, you can easily find them as the watch can identify their specific location and display it on a map.
7. Concentrate on speech and filter out background noise
Most digital hearing aids have directional microphones and other background-noise eliminating capability. With the Apple Watch, you have access to these capabilities on the fly, with the ability to narrow the focus in a hectic room, for example, by listening to the person you’re talking to while blocking the background chatter.
8. View your battery and connection status
You no longer have to worry about running out of battery power and being stuck without sound. You can conveniently track your hearing aid battery life right on the Apple Watch.
9. Make your hearing aids invisible
You can’t really make your hearing aids invisible with the Apple Watch, but with the proper hearing aid, it will appear that way to those around you. The Apple Watch, along with a completely-in-the-ear-canal hearing aid, will be entirely out of sight. And when you’re adjusting your hearing aid settings on your watch, people will think you’re checking the time.
10. Regulate your tinnitus
Sound therapy in the form of music, white noise, or nature sounds can be streamed wirelessly to your hearing aids, and the sounds can be altered to correspond to the frequency of your tinnitus—all from the Apple Watch.
Personalize your hearing experience
While the Apple Watch is not compatible with every type of hearing aid, several hearing aid models currently are, and we expect additional models to be designed in the near future. The Apple Watch is the perfect solution to many of the concerns expressed by our patients and permits a degree of interaction and control like never before.
Give us a call today to learn more about this incredible technology.
Do you have an Apple Watch? Do you use it to control your hearing aids? Let us know about your experience in a comment.