Apple announced Hearing Aid functionality in AirPod Pros 2 with clinical Tone testing

Have been using the transparency mode feature on my Air Pods Pro 2nd generation for a while. Audio-gram was entered. Streaming music is fantastic for me. No hearing aid I tried was close in this regard. When watching a movie with my family(they hate closed captions) they work well. When in a family gathering with my family and grandkids, they allow me to hear most conversations. Other than those situations I do not use them. The one aspect no one really mentions is that the Bluetooth RF generation can be quite large if the Iphone is moved away from the Air Pods. I have an RF meter and can watch the power increase as the iPhone moves away. In this regard, I keep my phone near me and also try and not use them for longer than 3 hours at a time.

They can pair with most bluetooth devices, but it remains to be seen whether the hearing aid functionality would work …

Is there a distance at which the emissions significantly climb versus when the phone is nearby? How does that compare to whatever hearing aids you’ve measured? Does it matter that hearing aids are closer to the brain or does the outer ear transmit the energy differently?

My experience was that connecting to a non-Apple device would cause the audiogram settings to disappear until you connected to your phone again. That was with the lightning connector model so might have changed.

As far as I could tell, you could leave your iPhone at home and hearing accommodations applied to transparency mode would still work.

@RobHooft said:

Is it true that the Airpod 2 Pros can work this way as standalone HAs?

The custom transparency mode has its limitations, but this new hearing aid feature might offer something different. Hopefully, we’ll find out soon with the new iOS release coming out this afternoon.

@RobHooft said:

connect to my iPad at home and I then can go for a walk with them in my ears without carrying that iPad in my backpocket? Can any users confirm?

My son says so. He’s been doing that for quite a long time. When he’s not wearing his fancy ear-pro headset at work. For a while he had two pairs going.

WH

I used a basic EMF meter and was able to show that both my hearing aids with Bluetooth and the Air Pods behaved the same in that the EMF increased as the iPhone moved away. But the Air Pods showed a much higher level of power than the hearing aids. I can be on the other side of my house and the Air Pods are still streaming music. There are no studies to show that Bluetooth is bad for your brain, but here is a link that I follow.

Do Wireless Earbuds Harm Your Brain? A Brain Cancer Doctor Sounds Off7

If you're an in-ear earbud devotee, medical experts offer one smart rule to help keep your brain healthy for the longterm.

Starkey aids should have airplane mode which will turn off Bluetooth, but you would likely need to reactivate airplane mode each time you reboot the hearing aids. Check the manual for details.

What a load of nonsense, Bluetooths been around 25 years and not one single case of “anything” happening to anyone, not one case anywhere in the world, it’s as safe as your mobile, tv, radio,microwave, router/modem to name just a few that all emit something to get the conspiry theorists going, and it’s not true the earth is flat!

I fully support a science based position regarding exposure to frequencies. To my knowledge, the biggest threat of bluetooth earbuds so far is ear infections due to over use.

I also can appreciate that for many people, it would help if our history of scientific discovery didn’t have a track record of doing things like discovering microwaves via melting chocolate bars that eventually led to the young death of a wonderful scientist, poisoning the dial painters of glow-in-the-dark watches (due to mouth exposure in wetting the brushes), having the same bloke who created leaded* gasoline also create the stuff that caused the ozone hole and manage to kill himself in his self-designed lifting-rig for his very injured self in a hospital bed, and having the sketchy practice of getting paid off by big Sugar, Big Gas, and Big Asbestos and Big Nicotine, to name but a few to deny early scientific findings of harm…

In a world where we are surrounded by things that are much larger than us, and well beyond our ability to fully comprehend, let alone control, it’s natural that people want to control variables that feel easily within their purview. We can’t fix the global glacier melt off, but we can probably not give ourselves a brain tumor with this one easy trick. And that provides a sense of certainty and surety in a world bereft of such things.

A little kindness towards those who are reaching for that is wise, rather than derision.

Veering a bit off-topic here, but yes- society appears to have moved from blind acceptance of technological progress (the great mishaps @kiki cited) to general paranoia (electrosmog, corona vaccines). We need more scientific education, less Fakebook…

Don’t do this. Just because you don’t understand the cell level response of 0.25watt GSM non-ionising radiation, while happily sitting in full view of 3.9 x 10power26 watts of ionising radiation with a little suncream on.

There’s simply no evidence of damage from the even lower wattage Bluetooth signalling devices or even the tiny wattages used by BLE.

Scepticism is great, industrial scepticism is fine if it’s based on evidence like environmental pollution, but blind ignorance because you don’t understand the science of your convictions is just weird.

@tenkan said:

Random question: if a person wore this with a cochlear implant, would the implant still function? Would two HAs still be able to talk to each other? You know, for science.

Depends on the wavelength and power of the transmission carrier wave. The shorter/more HF the signal is, the less it bends and the more it relies (or can be masked by) reflection.