We love innovation, new technology, new features offered by a new hearing aid. And we often follow the news to find out what a new hearing aid has, and we often choose new hearing aids because of those innovations and features.
I’ve sometimes thought about what I would like to have that doesn’t exist yet. so I’m opening this thread so that everyone can write me their ideas and I hope hearing aid manufacturers are reading this.
My ideas
Widget for sound amplification or sound balance on the lockscreen (android)
because it is more convenient and faster than opening the application. let’s say I’m driving a car and my sound balance is 100% stream, I get out of the car and enter the store, and I want to continue listening to music, but I have to hear the surrounding sound. I can do this by pressing on the hearing aid, but I’ve noticed that I don’t like doing that because the hearing aids are tiny. It would be better if there was a widget that I can keep on the lockscreen background.
People want a hearing aid for sleep, I noticed that reading some of the comments. I thought that there should then be a sleep mode that will turn down the sounds a little to make sleeping more pleasant, because we don’t need the volume to be on when we are awake to sleep, let’s say the sound should be muted by 30%.
If we use a hearing aid to sleep, then it would be desirable if there was an alarm clock that we could set in the HA application, and it would wake us up with the sounds and music we choose.
when someone calls us, some of us would like the hearing aid to say who is calling us. Because we have a habit of taking out our smartphone to see who is calling us and only then answer that person. I don’t answer every call, especially not unknown ones.
It reminded me that sometimes I wishes unknown numbers had a quieter ringing sound in my hearing aid. Sometimes that sound is irritating when we are talking to someone and we don’t want to answer the call.
You go on, I just remembered that. but if there are more ideas, I’ll put them here.
As a Phonak user, I remember when I used the Compilot which would announce the caller’s name for incoming phone calls. I also used the MyPilot remote control, which had an alarm clock which played a tone in the HA’s.
Now that all features are written to the chip in the HA and we don’t use streamers or remote controls, all the emphasis seems to have moved to Bluetooth and integration with cell phones, as there is not enough room on the one chip for everything.
A Bluetooth hub that your aids would always be connected to. The hub would keep a list of your devices, and you could choose which one you want to use at any given moment.
How about aids that can be adjusted so well to my loss needs and can know my requirements to hear to the point I can put them in my ears and go about my day like I have normal hearing. So I don’t have to stop an even think about the fact I am wearing them.
I meant an external device, to make up for HAs’ limitations in pairing. Your phone can act as a BT hub or router or proxy or whatever the right word is?
So you mean something that you have in your house or whatever that you can connect to the tv, a radio, etc with your HAs?
My phone will allow me to select my HAs, my headphones or whatever it has been paired with. I haven’t paired our stereo with any devices yet, I wonder if I could. I’ll try that, but I imagine if won’t work due to the limitations of the HAs.
Very small hearing aids with very long life chargeable batteries and advanced artificial intelligence which could manage both complex noisy environments and calm environments and can apply different rationales depending on environments.
It’d be very easy to implement - invert signal before the output amplifier. There are limitations to how effective it can be, and they’d vary between users and devices. Some users could just as easily turn off or down their HA. Practical limitations would be circuit latency (having no speech oriented processing will help), how closed the users canal is by dome or mold.
Truly waterproof hearing aids including usage in salt water. No limitations on how long in water, how deep in water (ok, maybe an exception for scuba because of pressure), type of water, velocity of water, type of activity, etc. Every one of my jackets has a hood so I can protect these ridiculously expensive and water unfriendly devices. I’d like to die with at last one hoodless jacket
I want hearing aids that I can wear somewhere other than behind my ear. Like as an ear clip on the edge of my ear, or on my earlobe, both with a tube and dome like my current RITEs. I have glasses, hats and hair behind my ears already; I don’t need anything else there.
I have no problem with the idea that people would see my HAs; I’d actually prefer it, so I didn’t have to keep explaining why I can’t always hear them. I’m so tired of hearing aid ads and literature talking about “discreet”, like hearing loss is something to be ashamed of.
And maybe the microphones facing forward would work better in noise.
here’s another idea. Charging hearing aids when we wear them. Many people hate to take it off and put it in the charger and then wait for it to charge for 1-2 hours. If there are chargers that use inductive charging, how about making a powerbank charger like the one in the picture ???
I believe my Oticon Real 1s are IP68 rated. When I tried to play soccer with them without “raincoats” on them I had problems after an hour. From my perspective, we still aren’t there.
Yes, the Aquarius were a dream come true until they weren’t.
