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 hearing 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 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 modifications and settings can be easily 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 furnished with more features, they become harder to handle. This makes a remote control a necessity, but who wants to haul around yet another device?
Even utilizing your cell phone as the remote control can get tiring, but with the Apple Watch, if you want to revise a setting, you just raise your wrist. It can’t get any easier 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 application on the watch, and swipe your finger to adjust the volume control slider. You can also easily fine-tune the treble and bass to create the best sound quality in any listening situation.
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 recommend 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 known as “environmental presets,” or settings that enhance sounds in accordance to the environment.
With the Apple Watch, you can easily access and change among presets, changing settings on the fly depending on your location. And as you render your adjustments, if there is a particular 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 walk and you want to listen to your favorite music album. That would ordinarily 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 twin purpose of a sound amplification device and a set of high-quality headphones.
Additionally, you can 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 missing hearing aids
We all lose important 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 ruining the device that connects us to sound, which can be scary.
Using the Apple Watch, if you misplace your hearing aids, you can rapidly track them down as the watch can detect their location and render it on a map.
7. Focus on speech and filter out background noise
Most digital hearing aids feature directional microphones and other background-noise canceling capabilities. With the Apple Watch, you have continuous access to these capabilities, with the ability to narrow the focus in a hectic room, for example, by listening to the person you’re speaking with while filtering 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 sound. You can easily track your hearing aid battery life directly on the Apple Watch.
9. Make your hearing aids invisible
You can’t actually make your hearing aids invisible with the Apple Watch, but with the appropriate hearing aid, it will appear that way to those around you. The Apple Watch, in combination with a completely-in-the-ear-canal hearing aid, will be entirely 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. 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 correspond to the frequency of your tinnitus—all from the Apple Watch.
Individualize your hearing experience
While 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 developed in the future. The Apple Watch is the ideal resolution to many of the problems expressed by our patients and enables a degree of interaction and control like never before.
Call us today to find out more about this extraordinary 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.
