Picture being able to adjust 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 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 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 adjustments 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. Forget 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 must, but who wants to haul around yet another device?
Even using your cell phone as the remote control can get monotonous, but with the Apple Watch, if you want to alter a setting, you just lift 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 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 create the perfect sound quality in any hearing 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 encourage 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 one at home; that’s why hearing aids have what are referred to 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, shifting 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, label it, and access it later.
5. Stream music and phone calls
You’re out for a run and you want to listen to your favorite music album. That would ordinarily 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 manner, your hearing aids have the dual purpose of a sound amplification device and a set of high-quality headphones.
Additionally, you can very easily answer or forward phone calls straight from the watch, as the audio is transferred wirelessly to your hearing aids not unlike 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 attempting to find them. But when we lose our hearing aids, it’s not only inconvenient—we risk harming the device that connects us to sound, which can be scary.
Using the Apple Watch, if you lose your hearing aids, you can immediately track them down as the watch can pin point their location and present it on a map.
7. Concentrate on speech and filter out background noise
Most digital hearing aids include 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 hectic room, for example, by listening to the person you’re conversing with while filtering 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 sound. 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 the people around you. The Apple Watch, in combination with a completely-in-the-ear-canal hearing aid, will be entirely out of view. And when you’re changing 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 music, white noise, 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.
Tailor your hearing experience
While the Apple Watch is not compatible with all types of hearing aid, a number of hearing aid models currently are, and we expect more models to be developed in the future. The Apple Watch is the optimal resolution to many of the problems expressed 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 impressive technology.
Do you own an Apple Watch? Do you use it to control your hearing aids? Tell us about your experience in a comment.
And I was just wordineng about that too!