Rechargeable aids: wanted by customers or by factories?

The type of cell used in disposable battery hearing aids doesn’t present the burn risk, just choke.

WH

Surely the type of battery chemistry is irrelevant.

It is the electrical discharge caused by saliva contact that does the damage.

See: Button batteries guide | ACCC Product Safety1

Fair catch. Yes, AI helps me write these.

Not machine translation though. I draft in English with help, which is why it
comes out too smooth. That part is on me. A post like #175 takes me about two
hours that way. Without it I’d manage four sentences and get half the terms
wrong, because I’m on the factory side in China and my English gives out exactly
where the technical part starts.

The claims are mine. Push on any of them.

I’d rather be told it reads wrong than have people quietly decide I’m a bot.

@luogangan, we are happy getting to know your insider review. Feel free to write more, if you want.

@x475aws said:

more hazardous lithium batteries

From what I understand, all batteries contain unpleasant chemicals, but what makes swallowing them a real emergency is that they remain stuck somewhere and start local hydrolysis (due to their electric power, and because our body fluids are all electrolytes). It is this generation of hydroxyl ions (OH-, crazy pH boost) that causes severe local tissue damage- thus, a common risk mechanism for all batteries.

Both are hazardous, but lithium more, because of its 3V vs. 1,45V in Zinc-air. That means after ingestion chemical reaction will be faster and more intensive with lithium batteries.

Zinc air batteries need air, and once swallowed, the source of air is cut off.

So, they are less reactive.They are also smaller than the usual lithium batteries, and less likely to get stuck.

That’s fair advice, and I’ve honestly tried it both ways. The trouble is my Chinese draft thinks in factory jargon, and the translation lands stiffer than when I fight it out in English from the start. Odd but true. The reading it twice part though, that one I’ll take. Thanks for meeting me halfway instead of writing the whole thing off.

@cvkemp said:

Rechargeable aids have simplified my life. I just put my aids on when I get up and forget about them until bedtime. At night I put them in their charger. If the power goes out the charger has battery backup so there isn’t any worry about them not charging. With Rechargeable aids I haven’t had any issues with sweating moisture. My life is almost like I have my hearing again.

I ‘hear’ what you’re saying

but mine are even simpler than that!

my counter to your simplicity is that I put new batteries in mine on Saturday, and every night at bedtime I put them in a safe place….no concern about getting them in any particular position to engage anything, no concern about power outages or anything else really, just drop them into a box or bowl. Get up the next morning and put them in my ears. The only times they are not in my ears all day long are when I shower or in the rare occasion when I go for a swim. Also off maybe on average once a week for an hour or so while I mow the grass or whatever….

rinse and repeat day after day after day…till the following Saturday morning when I replace the batteries. Powered from around about 5:30AM till 10-11PM pretty much every single day

Once in a blue moon I’ll forget and will get a low battery beep Saturday afternoon or Sunday…in which case it’s no big deal because I have a spare set of cells on my keychain. Less than a minute and I’m good for a solid week!

Oh, and I’ve never had a sweat or moisture problem that I know of. They’re IP68 rated…. but that said I do take them off if I find myself doing something excessively hot/dirty/wet….just because electronic and expensive..…and I would think that I’ll do the same with my new rechargeable aids too in the interest of taking care of them and keeping them just a little less gross.

@flashb1024 said:

It is indeed a true honor to be a “Warbler”

I missed the backstory into this comment. Are you referring to the sound that the aids make when there’s a tone or whistle?

I’d nearly forgotten that a while back there was a long time when I had that in my aids. I’m a habitual whistler…. whistling when I’m doing nothing in particular. It’s how my wife finds me when I’m killing time strolling around a store waiting for her…. Anyway, when I’d whistle my aids would warble on certain tones. That went away at some point, maybe my Audi turned down or turned off my feedback manager!

Yes, exactly the TTTF syndrome as it’s sometimes referred to. I’ve heard it referred to as Trilling, as well.

@bradw said:

I missed the backstory into this comment. Are you referring to the sound that the aids make when there’s a tone or whistle?

Yes exactly.

I’m a music lover, and pure tones or musical notes are the enemy of HAs.

I posted long ago on this subject, and occasionally it still comes up.

I think of the feedback canceller as a line in the gain budget. The receiver leaks back around to the mic. Past a point the loop sings. So I can back the gain off, or I can estimate that leak path and subtract it inside the chip before it ever reaches the amplifier. Estimating buys me headroom I’d otherwise have to go and buy from the fitting itself, and that bill lands on the wearer.

Trouble is my estimator works off how much what’s coming in matches what’s going out. A held whistle matches itself. From the inside it can’t tell your whistle from its own echo, so it adapts toward the wrong thing, gets it wrong, adapts again. That correcting is what you’re hearing. Not the whistle. The word for it in the trade is entrainment, and it’s in the literature under that word too, so it’s worth writing down. Flute, an organ note held down, a smoke alarm, the microwave. Which is why flashb1024’s line about pure tones lands for me. In my experience it isn’t that aids dislike music. A held note fits the description of a squeal that’s already sitting in the firmware we ship.

On yours going away, bradw. I can’t tell you what changed. My guess is something in the kit moved rather than your hearing, though a new mold or a fresh feedback measurement does it too, since that path lives in how the thing couples to your ear. Later designs nudge the outgoing signal so it stops being quite so periodic, and some add a check for whether a tone is really coming back around the fitting or just arriving from the room. Which of those a given aid does, I genuinely don’t know. We get the block and the parameters, not the reasoning. If it comes back, the two worth writing down are which note did it and which program you were in, since a lot of what a fitter can change on the feedback side is held per program.

@bradw said:

I’m a habitual whistler…. whistling when I’m doing nothing in particular. It’s how my wife finds me when I’m killing time strolling around a store waiting for her….

Very cool.