Imagine 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 picture 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 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 controls and settings can be accessed from a software program within the watch—meaning you’ll never have to touch your hearing aids or endlessly 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 contemporary hearing aids is that as they become smaller, more efficient, and loaded with more capabilities, they become harder to handle. This makes a remote control a requirement, but who wants to lug 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 modify a setting, you just raise your wrist. It can’t get any easier than that.
2. Effortlessly adjust the volume, treble, and bass
Need the hearing aid volume adjusted? No problem, just discreetly raise your wrist, tap the hearing aid application 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
Circumstances 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 functionality on your spouse.
4. Create and save custom sound settings
Having a discussion in a restaurant is very different than having one at home; that’s why hearing aids have what are termed “environmental presets,” or settings that amplify sounds with respect to the environment.
With the Apple Watch, you can effortlessly access and switch among presets, switching settings on the fly depending on where you are. 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 in the future.
5. Stream music and phone calls
You’re out for a walk and you want to listen to your favorite music 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 double purpose of a sound amplification device and a set of high-quality earbuds.
Additionally, you can very easily 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 lost hearing aids
We all lose valuable things, like our car keys, and we use up a lot of time attempting to find them. But when we lose our hearing aids, it’s not only inconvenient—we risk breaking the device that links us to sound, which can be distressing.
With the Apple Watch, if you lose your hearing aids, you can speedily find them as the watch can pin point their location and display it on a map.
7. Focus on speech and block out background noise
Most digital hearing aids include directional microphones and other background-noise canceling functionality. With the Apple Watch, you have access to these features on the fly, with the ability to narrow the focus in a hectic room, for instance, by tuning in to the person you’re talking to while blocking the background chatter.
8. View your battery and connection status
You no longer need to stress 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 literally make your hearing aids invisible with the Apple Watch, but with the appropriate hearing aid, it will appear that way to the people around you. The Apple Watch, in combination with a completely-in-the-ear-canal hearing aid, will be totally out of sight. And when you’re adjusting your hearing aid settings on your watch, people will think you’re checking the time.
10. Manage 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 adapted 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, a number of hearing aid models currently are, and we anticipate additional models to be designed in the near future. The Apple Watch is the ultimate answer to many of the issues conveyed by our patients and permits a degree of interaction and control like never before.
Contact us today to learn more about this extraordinary technology.
Do you own an Apple Watch? Do you use it to control your hearing aids? Tell us about your experience in a comment.