Picture being able to manipulate the volume, treble, and bass on your hearing aids as discretely and effortlessly as checking the time on your wrist. Or imagine fine-tuning your hearing aids for any hearing situation 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 users are redefining the way they interact 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 modifications and settings can be accessed from an application within the watch—meaning you’ll never have to touch your hearing aids or constantly fumble through your phone again.
Here are 10 cool things you can do with your Apple Watch and compatible hearing aids.
1. Abandon the hearing aid remote control
The problem with contemporary hearing aids is that as they come to be smaller, more effective, and furnished with more features, they become more difficult to handle. This makes a remote control a necessity, but who wants to carry around yet another device?
Even utilizing your cell phone as the remote control can get monotonous, but with the Apple Watch, if you want to adjust a setting, you just raise your wrist. It can’t get any simpler than that.
2. Effortlessly adjust the volume, treble, and bass
Need the hearing aid volume adjusted? No problem, just inconspicuously raise your wrist, tap the hearing aid app on the watch, and swipe your finger to modify the volume control slider. You can also easily fine-tune the treble and bass to produce the best sound quality in any hearing scenario.
3. Mute your hearing aids
Situations occur when you don’t want to amplify sound, and with the Apple Watch, you can turn off the hearing aids with the push 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 busy restaurant is very different than having a quiet conversation at home; that’s why hearing aids have what are known as “environmental presets,” or settings that enhance sounds in accordance to the environment.
With the Apple Watch, you can conveniently access and change among presets, varying settings on the fly depending on your location. And as you render your adjustments, if there is a unique setting that works especially 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 walk and you want to play your favorite album. That would typically require you to remove your hearing aids, but with Apple Watch, you can stream music wirelessly from the watch to your hearing aids. In this way, your hearing aids have the dual function of a sound amplification device and a pair of high-quality headsets.
Additionally, you can effortlessly answer or forward phone calls straight from the watch, as the audio is sent wirelessly to your hearing aids just like the music.
6. Find your misplaced hearing aids
We all lose valuable things, like our car keys, and we use up a great deal of time trying to find them. But when we lose our hearing aids, it’s not only inconvenient—we risk harming the mechanism that links us to sound, which can be scary.
Using the Apple Watch, if you misplace your hearing aids, you can swiftly track them down as the watch can pin point their specific location and render it on a map.
7. Focus on speech and filter out background noise
Most digital hearing aids include directional microphones and other background-noise canceling capabilities. With the Apple Watch, you have access to these capabilities on the fly, with the ability to narrow the focus in a busy room, for example, by listening to the person you’re conversing with while blocking the background noise.
8. View your battery and connection status
You no longer need to stress about running out of battery power and being stuck without audio. You can effortlessly keep tabs on your hearing aid battery life directly on the Apple Watch.
9. Make your hearing aids invisible
You can’t literally 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 fully out of sight. And when you’re fine-tuning your hearing aid settings on your watch, people will think you’re checking the time.
10. Control your tinnitus
Sound therapy in the form of white noise, music, or nature sounds can be streamed wirelessly to your hearing aids, and the sounds can be modified to correspond to the frequency of your tinnitus—all from the Apple Watch.
Personalize your hearing experience
Although 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 launched in the near future. The Apple Watch is the ultimate answer to many of the concerns conveyed by our patients and provides a degree of interaction and control like never before.
Give us a call today to find out more about this incredible technology.
Do you own an Apple Watch? Do you use it to control your hearing aids? Let us know about your experience in a comment.