Just imagine being able to fine-tune the volume, treble, and bass on your hearing aids as discretely and easily as checking the time on your wrist. Or imagine fine-tuning your hearing aids for any listening situation without ever having to touch your hearing aids.
Sound too good to be true? A few years ago, it was; but with the Apple Watch, hearing aid owners are redefining the way they interact with their hearing aids.
With Apple’s most personal product 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 controls and settings can be accessed from a software program within the watch—meaning you’ll never have to touch your hearing aids or habitually 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 problem with modern hearing aids is that as they come to be smaller, more powerful, and loaded with more capabilities, they become harder to handle. This makes a remote control a must, but who wants to lug around yet another device?
Even using your cell phone as the remote control can get tedious, 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. Easily adjust the volume, treble, and bass
Need the hearing aid volume adjusted? No problem, just discreetly raise 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 produce the best sound quality in any listening scenario.
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 encourage using this feature on your spouse.
4. Create and save custom sound settings
Having a discussion in a 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 amplify sounds in accordance to the environment.
With the Apple Watch, you can effortlessly access and change among presets, adjusting settings on the fly depending on your location. And as you make your changes, if there is a particular 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 jog and you want to listen to your favorite album. That would typically call for you to take out your hearing aids, but with Apple Watch, you can stream music wirelessly from the watch to your hearing aids. In this regard, your hearing aids have the double purpose of a sound amplification device and a pair of high-quality headsets.
You can also effortlessly answer or forward phone calls straight from the watch, as the audio is directed 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 lot of time trying to find them. But when we lose our hearing aids, it’s not only inconvenient—we risk harming the gadget that connects us to sound, which can be distressing.
With the Apple Watch, if you lose your hearing aids, you can immediately find them as the watch can detect their location and display it on a map.
7. Focus on speech and filter background noise
Most digital hearing aids include directional microphones and other background-noise eliminating capacities. With the Apple Watch, you have access to these capabilities on the fly, with the capacity to narrow the focus in a noisy room, for instance, by tuning in to the person you’re talking to while filtering the background noise.
8. View your battery and connection status
You no longer need to worry about running out of battery power and being stranded without audio. You can easily 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 appropriate hearing aid, it will look that way to the people around you. The Apple Watch, in combination with a completely-in-the-ear-canal hearing aid, will be fully out of sight. And when you’re modifying your hearing aid controls on your watch, people will think you’re checking the time.
10. Regulate 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 adjusted to fit the frequency of your tinnitus—all from the Apple Watch.
Tailor 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 made in the near future. The Apple Watch is the ideal answer to several of the problems expressed by our patients and provides for a level of interaction and control like never before.
Give us a call today to learn more about this extraordinary 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.
