Just imagine being able to manipulate 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 couple of years ago, it was; but with the Apple Watch, hearing aid users are changing the way they engage 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 an application within the watch—meaning you’ll never have to touch your hearing aids or habitually 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 modern hearing aids is that as they come to be smaller, more powerful, and furnished with more capabilities, they become harder 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 tedious, but with the Apple Watch, if you want to revise 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 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 ideal sound quality in any hearing scenario.
3. Mute your hearing aids
Circumstances arise 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 suggest using this functionality on your spouse.
4. Create and save custom sound settings
Having a conversation in a restaurant is very different than having one at home; that’s why hearing aids have what are labeled “environmental presets,” or settings that amplify sounds with respect to the environment.
With the Apple Watch, you can conveniently access and change among presets, modifying settings on the fly depending on your location. And as you make your adjustments, if there is a particular setting that works especially well, you can save the setting, label it, and access it later.
5. Stream music and phone calls
You’re out for a walk and you want to listen to your favorite album. That would typically require 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 way, your hearing aids have the double purpose of a sound amplification device and a set of high-quality earphones.
You can also very easily answer or forward phone calls straight from the watch, as the audio is transmitted wirelessly to your hearing aids not unlike the music.
6. Find your lost hearing aids
We all lose important things, like our car keys, and we waste a great deal of time trying to find them. But when we misplace our hearing aids, it’s not only inconvenient—we risk damaging the device that connects us to sound, which can be distressing.
Using the Apple Watch, if you lose your hearing aids, you can easily find them as the watch can pin point their specific location and render it on a map.
7. Concentrate on speech and filter background noise
Most digital hearing aids feature directional microphones and other background-noise canceling capability. With the Apple Watch, you have access to these capabilities on the fly, with the capacity to narrow the focus in a busy room, for example, by tuning in to the person you’re conversing with while filtering the background chatter.
8. View your battery and connection status
You no longer have to worry about running out of battery power and being stranded without audio. You can easily keep tabs on 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 seem that way to those around you. The Apple Watch, when combined with a completely-in-the-ear-canal hearing aid, will be completely out of view. And when you’re fine-tuning your hearing aid controls on your watch, people will think you’re checking the time.
10. Control 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 adjusted to complement 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 anticipate more models to be designed in the future. The Apple Watch is the ultimate resolution to several of the problems conveyed by our patients and permits a level of interaction and control like never before.
Call us today to find out more about this phenomenal 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.