Skip to content
HearingTracker
Log in

Smart phone compatibility--reality vs what people want

This topic is closed.

51 replies6.1k viewsLast reply

Jump
Link to this topic

I will make one more comment then shut up. Noise supression must be difficult to implement. How does the circuitry decide what is noise and what is a legitimate signal? Anyway, my hearing aids do squeal occasionally when my wife whistles and while watching some
TV programs. In contrast, my Audibel hearing aids essentially shut off when I was driving or running a sink full of water.

Well, it is time to go. My left hearing aid just said, “Low battery.”

@member6 said:

I will make one more comment then shut up. Noise supression must be difficult to implement. How does the circuitry decide what is noise and what is a legitimate signal?

Generally the circuit looks for the modulation in the signal to determine whether it’s noise or speech. Speech tends to have lots of modulation while static noise (mechanical sounds like fan, road noise, water running, etc) tend to have less modulation and therefore are considered noise.

Noise suppression is usually done by controlling the directionality of the microphones to block out surrounding sounds and focus on the sound in the front. Noise suppression is also done by detecting non-modulating signals and consider them non-speech noise and their gain is attenuated.

There are even more ways to improve speech in noise but the 2 mentioned above are the most basic ones.

In reply to @member6

They do sound like interesting devices. I’m guessing Volume of 4dB is 4dB above baseline? I think I remember there was some sort of initial settings that get input. If you wanted to give a full review, you could log on to the main Hearing Tracker site. Then go to Hearing Aids and a submenu opens up and select Personal Sound Amplifiers. If you go further down and select the brand they will pop up. Nobody else has done a review. I do think hearing aids continue to get better. I remember my father in law’s hearing aids always used to squeal loudly. Mine will chirp slightly if I cup my hand over my ear. From reading the literature, yours do have some sort of noise and feedback suppression.

Edited

I think to write a review I would have to have some experience with a wider range of hearing aids. I am replying because my hearing aids have absolutely no feedback when I cup my hands over my ears. This is only because I use Comply foam tips on my hearing aids. When the audiologist at COSTCO saw them she said I could use double domes on their hearing aids…nuts to that! I seem to be an outlier in this forum. It surprises me to read posts on this forum that imply a direct connection between an Android phone and hearing aids isn’t implemented more widely because Bluetooth requires too much battery power. I use my Bluetooth direct connection all day with no problem at all.

I agree that we’re still a couple of generations away from full bidirectional functionality between hearing aids and cell phones. My biggest gripe is that if I have my Starkey Halos paired with my iPhone, I have to live with the phone attempting to push audio (iTunes, phone calls, etc.) to my hearing aids, even when the phone’s settings state otherwise. The ability to adjust hearing aid settings from my phone has limited appeal for me. I tried that functionality a lot when my hearing aids were new (4 1/2 years ago), but all of my efforts to improve on the audiologist’s settings were always less successful than leaving them alone. I now never pair my hearing aids with my phone.

@KenP - it’s not the notifications. I have most notifications turned off completely and the few remaining don’t hit my hearing aids. Besides, my phone is almost always in do not disturb mode.

It’s the handoff of audio coming from iTunes and phone calls that are the problem. No matter what I have done in the iPhone’s Settings, the audio insists on routing to my hearing aids, forcing me to manually change the destination after the call or first song starts.

Well, I don’t stream much but with phone calls I get a popup that lets me select aids or speaker. I think the settings allow you to define that and it defaults to “automatic”.

In reply to @steven_k

Hello,
Guessing you have may already tried this but to have control over call and media routing through to the hearing aids have you tried SETTINGS>ACCESSIBILITY>MfI HEARING AIDS>AUDIO ROUTING. This will then give you the options of adjusting/cancelling the signal routing depending on what you are wanting to use it for. I have a few patients who only want to use the app so I disable all of the routing capabilities which seem to work well.

Also, from a clinician perspective I am also finding that there seem to be a number of different teething issues with the Mfi hearing aids. the seemingly endless recent spate of iphone updates is also making for some interesting results!

In reply to @MDB

@MDB said:

I could expound on this, but I’ll end with a link to a joke about if operating systems were airlines. Many of you have probably seen it. Augury Corporation - What if Operating Systems Were Airlines?

LOL! Ain’t it the TRUTH. I had to share this with my hubs, the Tech Kahuna, who can relate, having used many of these OS’s in his day. Now who’s going to write a similar joke about “If Browsers Ran Airlines”?

To your original point, tho, YES, I think many of the community want the damn aids to just WORK and do what they need, effortlessly. No one wants to read a manual much less kludge together a custom solution with HA, app and device (phone, TV, laptop, other Bluetooth thingey).

Part of the problem is that the HA community is still largely on the senior side. Times are changing with younger, more tech-savvy wearers hopefully driving some market solutions.

As for Apple vs Android, I still maintain: 4 out of 5 worldwide cell phone users are Android. So having a bluetooth-compatible solution for that platform should be a YUGE market opp’y. I have to say Oticon was late to the party with a ClipOn streamer for Android (did someone say Santa is delivering them soon?).

Related discussions