I’ve recently been diagnosed with moderate hearing loss and I’ve been wearing my first (trial-) hearing aids (Phonak) for just over a week now. I really like them, except for the limited battery life when streaming. Therefore I’m almost certainly going to get the Resound Nexia / Jabra Enhance 20 instead.
That’s obviously where LE Audio and Auracast comes in… After spending countless hours on this amazing forum, it seems that the technology is here, but there are very few 3rd-party devices, and compatibility is lacking.
Smartphone support is limited to recent Samsung models and people’s experiences have been mixed at best.
The only success story so far seems to be pairing the Nexia with Resound’s own Streamer+.
I should start by saying that while I’m an engineer and do firmware development for a living, Bluetooth is not my area of expertise. Please correct me if/when I’m wrong!
Let’s start with the Bluetooth standard and what’s likely required to connect to HAs using LE Audio or Auracast. Bluetooth specifies a range of services and profiles which build on each other to provide the desired functionality. This page shows what’s relevant for LE Audio, including links to the corresponding specifications.
Notice the ‘Use Case Specific Profiles’ HAP and HAS:
The only mandatory requirements are support for the ‘BAP Unicast Client’ role (BAP = Basic Audio Profile), and the CISP set Coordinator (CISP = Coordinated Set Identification Profile).
But I don’t know enough about Bluetooth to know whether these are common features or new and onerous requirements…
Here is my understanding of the situation and hopefully it will help you in your investigation. I’ve done some basic Bluetooth hacking and have a variety of sniffers, transmitters, receivers, etc. to mess around with that stuff and am very eager to see the new LE audio standards and support to begin rolling out to hearing aids and other devices. Hopefully this information will be helpful.
I don’t believe HAP/HAS is needed for 3rd party devices to work with hearing aids and the new LE Audio capabilities including the Auracast. HAP/HAS is optional and I think is focused more on interoperability between 3rd party devices and hearing aids across any manufacturer allowing remote control of programs, presets, volume, microphone gain, alerts, etc. Today, every manufacturer sells proprietary remotes or has proprietary software on the mobile devices to remotely control the hearing aids. In the future, the 3rd party device needs to be able to interact with the hearing aids to introduce new functionality, especially related to using the microphones in the hearing aids to transmit the users voice to interact with 3rd party devices. That level of integration controlling the gain levels of the hearing aid microphone without necessarily increasing the volume level of the receiver in the user’s ear. HAP/HAS provides remote control capability at that level.
I’m not very clear on the purpose of the unicast capabilities, but it seems like that is focused on extremely low latency communication such as broadcasting audio at a live event and having it synchronized with the person speaking into a microphone. That’s not much of an issue to deal with in a movie theater or TV since those already have latency correction capabilities, (lipsync) to keep things from looking off. Unicast looks more like extreme latency priority over audio quality.
If the Moerlabs device has base-level LE Audio, it should work just fine with a hearing aid claiming to support the same base-level of functionality without any need for HAP/HAS.
Capabilities like broadcast audio for Auracast have more dependencies above just the LE Audio streamer since you need to have the Auracast Assistant in the mix to direct the hearing aids to tune to the correct channel. It was looking like it would be a long road until everything would be in available and users had upgraded all of their devices, (mobile devices and hearing aids) with devices that support the LE Audio standards. There was some good news a few weeks ago when the Bluetooth SIG made a blog post with a new developed guide titled: Accelerating Market Adoption for Auracast™ Broadcast Audio. This guide describes how manufacturers and developers can work around an end user that may have new headphones or hearing aids that support Auracast, but they haven’t upgraded their mobile device. It’s pretty clever and should open the door to get things moving a little faster.
Blog Post:
Guide from the Bluetooth SIG:
Kind of a late-night brain dump on what I know about this stuff, but looking forward to hearing about what you discover and comparing notes.
