Like many other devices, hearing aids are getting more intuitive all of the time. They’re also more inconspicuous and cooler than ever before. The average American is older, reports The Us Census Department, as the whole population gets older, and unfortunately, loss of hearing, especially in older people, is very common. Approximately 37.5 million American adults and rising say they have some amount of hearing loss.
Luckily more possibilities for treating loss of hearing are available due to amazing developments in recent hearing technology. Here are just a few of the enhancements that are now available.
Hearing Aids That Keep Track of Your Overall Health
Hearing aids are equal to if not better than a fitness tracker at keeping track of many vital signs. Not only can it monitor the time between heartbeats to help detect potential cardiovascular troubles, but it also tracks calories burned, heart rate, step count, and the total number of steps taken. They’re also working on technology that can measure other key vital signs such as blood pressure and oxygenation of the blood. There are other potential benefits that come with hearing aids, like the ability to help drown out tinnitus and will help your overall hearing so that your social life will get better as well. Actually, social involvement is another metric we should pay attention to because it has been linked to your overall health. With these new hearing aids, you won’t even need a fitness device or smartwatch because the hearing aids can sync to your smartphone so you can listen to your tunes.
Streaming Made Smarter And Easier
As we get addicted to virtual assistants including Alexa and Siri, staying connected and able to communicate with them is getting more important. Even if you ignore the lure of talking directly to these assistants, hearing aids with Bluetooth permit you to stream sound from any Bluetooth device such as your smart TV or phone. Imagine the benefits of this: You could hear the play-by-play in the big game clearly over your family’s cheers (or at least avoid getting yelled at for having the volume too high). You will be capable of managing your hearing loss more discreetly and also appreciate your music, phone calls, and shows more by hearing them directly in your ears.
Automatic Adjustments
Have you noticed that you get ads from Goodreads and they seem to know what type of books you like to read? Or how Amazon somehow know which items to recommend? This is the power of artificial intelligence and big data. Modern hearing aids harness this kind of intelligence and use it to make changes according to how you reacted in the past. It will notice how you prefer to turn the volume down when you enter the train station and do that automatically the next time it detects you’ve entered the station (or any other circumstance with to much background noise). They are extending this technology to include crowdsourcing also, allowing information from other people to inform your hearing aids that you’re approaching a loud zone. Over time the hearing aids add up all this information to make recommendations and automatic corrections, so you can adjust quickly to changes in the hearing environment.
You Won’t Have to Keep Replacing Those Tiny Batteries
Why would you want to constantly struggle with hearing aid batteries? Rechargeable hearing aids are now on the market. While you can do a lot to help increase the life of your hearing aids’ batteries, let’s be honest…it’s still costly and frustrating. Better still, technology to recharge your hearing aids while they are still in your ears is being developed.