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 picture fine-tuning your hearing aids for any hearing environment 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 users are changing the way they engage with their hearing aids.
With Apple’s most personal gadget to date, you can now leave behind 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 easily accessed from a software program within the watch—meaning you’ll never have to touch your hearing aids or constantly fumble through your cell 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 contemporary hearing aids is that as they become smaller, more effective, and loaded with more features, they become harder to handle. This makes a remote control a necessity, but who wants to carry 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 alter a setting, you just lift 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 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 ideal sound quality in any hearing environment.
3. Mute your hearing aids
Situations 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 encourage using this feature on your spouse.
4. Create and save custom sound settings
Having a discussion 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 with respect to the environment.
With the Apple Watch, you can conveniently access and change among presets, adjusting settings on the fly depending on your location. And as you make your adjustments, if there is a specific 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 jog and you want to play your favorite music album. That would generally 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 dual function of a sound amplification device and a pair of high-quality headphones.
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 important things, like our car keys, and we waste a lot of time attempting to find them. But when we lose our hearing aids, it’s not only inconvenient—we risk ruining the mechanism that links us to sound, which can be scary.
Using the Apple Watch, if you misplace your hearing aids, you can quickly 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 come with directional microphones and other background-noise canceling capacities. 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 instance, by listening to the person you’re talking to 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 audio. You can easily monitor 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 those around you. The Apple Watch, when combined with a completely-in-the-ear-canal hearing aid, will be totally out of view. 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 music, white noise, or nature sounds can be streamed wirelessly to your hearing aids, and the sounds can be altered 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 expect more models to be launched in the future. The Apple Watch is the ideal solution to many of the concerns conveyed by our patients and allows for a level of interaction and control like never before.
Give us a call today to find out more about this phenomenal 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.