Is there a &quot;Find your hearing aid&quot; app for the KS10?

No native find my aid app for the KS10s… don’t think there’s a third party app available.

I thought this topic had been addressed by someone else on the forum before but I can’t find the post(s).

If you go to the Apple App Store and search on either “Bluetooth Finder” or “Bluetooth Scanner,” you’ll come up with a bunch of hits. One, Wunderfind: Find Lost Devices (Headphones and Fitness Trackers), sound alot like Find My iPhone and has been rated more than 77,000 times (and probably downloaded a bunch more). Has a 4.5 Star rating (and in-app purchases). Just an app, too, like nRF Connect, the Nordic Semiconductor utility app, will allow you to detect your ’s and measure the BT signal intensity, but obviously lacks a lot of the other features of a Find My iPhone-like utility.

I am sure there is similar available for Android, too.

Edit_Update: See review of Wunderfind for iOS below. It’s pretty good and doesn’t depend on devices. There is also Wunderfind for Android by same developer. The Android version is just a basic free version with no Pro upgrade available as for iOS, . There is no map functionality just a local signal strength/proximity detection functionality and just as for iOS (see below), although the app detects both BT Classic and BT LE in proximity, it only range finds on the BT LE devices. Whether you are near a BT Classic device would basically be a Yes/No or Black vs. White decision process.

Raudrive

Texas Hill Country

@manzol said:

I can connect them via Bluetooth to our IPhone 11’s, but they are not MFI, so I can’t connect them to the IPhone’s “Hearing Devices” feature. The apps I’ve looked at call for MFI hearing aids.

Please go back to the Costco hearing center and ask for help.
They should help you figure things out.
Good luck.

In reply to @jim_lewis

I gave the Wunderfind app a try and it works pretty well. It doesn’t require a device to be a device but it probably does work best with devices that output Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) signals. It does detect the presence of Bluetooth Classic emitting devices but doesn’t do a good job of up close range finding with them (the nRF Connect app would still give you signal strength and an idea of close-up proximity for those devices). IIRC, even though recent Phonak devices use Classic for streaming, they still employ BT LE for control via the smartphone app, etc. So there should be no reason you can’t detect and range find KS10’s, KS9’s, Marvels or Paradise HA’s with an app like Wunderfind.

I opted to get the $4.99 paid Wunderfind app just to try it out. It works on two levels, much like the ReSound Find My Hearing Aid applet in the ReSound Smart 3D smartphone app. First, it records (with the user’s permission, of course) the GPS/WiFi location where any BT device was last detected. If you had it working, lost an HA on the job, then went home, and then realized you lost an HA, and opened the app, it would show on a map that the last known location of your HA was at work, not at home.

The second functionality is close range and based on BT signal strength (“You’re getting hot, No!, you’re getting cold!” type of locating). This doesn’t seem to work for classic BT signals - only the presence of a device is detected but range finding does work pretty well for BT LE-emitting devices.

My Microsoft Surface Headphones are NOT a MFi device. In the screenshot below, you can see that Wunderfind has picked up my Surface Headphones both for their BT Classic streaming signal broadcast and for their BT LE device control BT signaling and Wunderfind does a reasonable job of approximating how close I am to the non-MFi headphones. My ReSound Quattro HA’s broadcast in BT LE less frequently as they hadn’t updated their distance during the brief time I had the app open to take the screenshot. But I’ve used Wunderfind to locate my proximity to my Quattro’s and it works pretty well.

The other little sticking point of Wunderfind is it seems to have a fixed idea of how strong a BT LE should be with distance (haven’t checked whether signal strength with distance can be recalibrated for a specific device). nRF Connect says the BT LE emanating from my ReSound Quattro’s is intrinsically a very weak signal and Wunderfind correspondingly thinks that the devices are further away from my smartphone than they actually are.

At the very least if you used Wunderfind to look for KS10’s, they’d appear on the BT detection screen when you’re in 15 to 20 feet of them and if you’re much farther away, they won’t (but you might use the iPhone BT settings screen and look for “connected” to tell the same). And if you were allowing Wunderfind to run in the background and your location to always be tracked on the iPhone, the last known position of your HA’s down to ~house-size resolution should always be recorded on a map.

Screen Capture Showing Wunderfind Detects BT Classic and BT LE
But Only Range Finds the LE Signal for a NON-MFi Device by Microsoft

Edit_Update: There is also a NOTIFY WHEN LOST feature in Wunderfind - so presumably that monitors whether your smartphone is always within BT detection range of a device and sounds an alert when the device signal is lost. My Surface Headphones go to sleep if not worn, the BT signal is then off, and Wunderfind now reports that the device was last seen 38 minutes ago and on the map shows that it was last seen within my house. The app compatibility statement says that it works with Apple devices, portable speakers, Fitness Tracker, Fitbit Tracker and many more devices. Says the app runs on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and iMessage apps - don’t understand the iMessage capability/relationship?

Grantham, Lincolnshire, UK

I mentioned but Wunderfind and Bluetooth Scanner elsewhere. The Wunderfind certainly worked picking up both my , my wife’s Fitbit, two Tile devices and my daughter’s watch. The range estimate was very rough, 3-4 metres with the aids in the ear.
The Scanner however gives far more detail and can be paired with your devices so you can ignore all others, in a shop for instance.
It presents the signal on a dynamic graph.

Screenshot_20210907_074812_com.pzolee.bluetoothscanner

It has a sound feature and installed on two phones could be very useful. It looks promising. The lifetime fee is just over a dollar per year of a silly $3.25 lifetime.

In reply to @jim_lewis

@jim_lewis said:

I thought this topic had been addressed by someone else on the forum before but I can’t find the post(s).

Perhaps this is the previous thread on the forum that discussed in general what ’s have a Find My Hearing Aid function and the topic of scanners came up: https://forum.hearingtracker.com/t/mom-needs-aid-she-can-locate-if-lost/57817?u=jim_lewis (member archive)

@roybrocklebank said:

The Scanner however gives far more detail and can be paired with your devices so you can ignore all others, in a shop for instance.

Wunderfind also shows devices that have been paired with your phone first under “My Devices.” Discovered devices not paired with your phone are listed secondarily under Other Devices. That might show you for instance, in the extreme, if someone had planted a Bluetooth tracking device on you! (not something I usually worry about!).

@roybrocklebank. Roy, the Bluetooth Scanner sounds very interesting but I’m having trouble finding it in the Apple App Store. Could you mention the name of the developer. That would help me find it. Thanks!

Edit_Update: I found Bluetooth Scanner in the Google Playstore. It’s by Zoltan Pallagi and since I patronize the Play Store so infrequently these days, Google gave me a $1 coupon to buy the Extreme Edition for $3.49. I checked all the groups in the app settings but on my Galaxy Note 8, only running Android 8, the only thing it detects is classic for some reason?! (my Note 8 and my computer) Doesn’t detect my ReSound Quattros or a Google Home nearby. It says repeated scans may be necessary to detect devices and discovery may need to be turned on. nRF Connect detects a bunch more BT devices near me on 1st scan - listing BONDED (paired) 1st and omits my Note 8 as the host device. But I must have some settings wrong-I checked detection of every kind of device, I thought?! The app gives a very nice summary of all the BT devices paired to my Galaxy Note 8 (but not currently active). I think the OP was looking for something that would work on an iPhone being used with KS10’s - so although Bluetooth Scanner looks like a pretty powerful app, it’s only for the Android devices- and doesn’t seem to have the last known location mapping function that Wunderfind does on an iOS device - which would probably cost the user a bit of battery charge to be employing constantly.

Grantham, Lincolnshire, UK

Glad you found it. While I have these two on my phone and effectively lucked in early there are many to try. One I tried and rejected, in a High Street, listed literally dozens of contacts. These two seem more selective.
Did you find his email address - pzoleex.info@gmail.com
You might get answers from him.

Grantham, Lincolnshire, UK

In reply to @jim_lewis

Z300M

In reply to @roybrocklebank

I just tried the Android version of Wunderfind. It found just two Google devices (not further identified), and something called “Mitel Sync,” which I do not recognize – no hearing aids or other devices. It sometimes shows an “HP” device also, which I assume belongs to a neighbor.

In reply to @roybrocklebank

Sep 8, 2021Edited

@roybrocklebank said:

The Scanner however gives far more detail and can be paired with your devices so you can ignore all others, in a shop for instance.

I found the reason that the Android app Bluetooth Scanner by Soltan Pellagi doesn’t show my Quattro’s.

It’s precisely the quoted phrase from Roy Brocklebank and a little bit more. Bluetooth Scanner only shows devices in a scan that have both been paired and are currently CONNECTED to the Android smartphone running the app that one is using.

At the time I tried the test, my Quattro’s were quite active, both paired and connected to my iPhone. Since they weren’t connected with my Galaxy Note 8 (although they had been paired), they didn’t show up at all in Bluetooth Scanner. As soon as I turned off my iPhone and went to my Note 8 BT settings to connect, both ’s showed up as BT LE devices on my Android phone running Bluetooth Scanner.

Same deal with my Surface Headphones. They don’t show up at all when on but not connected to my Note 8 BT. But both classic and BT LE signals from the headphones show up in Bluetooth Scanner when my Note 8 is actively connected to my Surface Headphones.

So Bluetooth Scanner does offer good device identity from a manufacturers database listings of BT devices and their BT properties and it does offer range finding, once the device is connected. But just looking in your smartphone settings to see if a device you believe active is connected will tell you whether you’re in range to find the device. Because if you’re not connected you won’t. Many BT scanners have some sort of range finding display. But if you’re not in range, the best type of app is one that offers to remember on a map where a device was last “seen” via BT. Such an app would tell you where to go to get in range to be connected and use range finding in the first place, at the cost of keeping BT and location services on all the time. So with this in mind, perhaps there doesn’t have to be one “best” app. One could look for the best BT device location mapping app. And then after looking to find where your smartphone last remembers to have seen a HA, you could use another app that you like as the best local range finding (am I hot or cold?!) proximity app to home in on where the device might be around that map location. Perhaps you don’t really need one app that does it all.

Grantham, Lincolnshire, UK

I will ask TILE if there is a possibility that their App could connect with . The App can pair with many devices such as BOSE or Fitbit and these can be located in the same way as a Tile device.

I don’t see any financial benefit to Tile doing this as the App is free for a local search. To use the last found option though using 3rd party detection I guess you need to be registered.

Sep 8, 2021Edited

Yes! That’s a good idea. A possible advantage of Tile and Apple’s AirTag is that even if you had an app that records the last known position of an item like a hearing aid when your phone was last near it, if somehow the lost item gets moved (the dog ran away with it!), it can anonymously get detected and its new position anonymously relayed to its owner from the newly detected moved location being relayed by someone’s phone via Wi-Fi or cellular data to the system’s servers (Tile’s or Apple’s) that notify the owner that someone has passed by the item and it’s now been located at X,Y,Z. It’s a neat crowd-sourcing location idea and the people who agree to participate “volunteer” their phone BT sensing and a little bit of phone CPU time to aid the service and never know that they’re near the object that their phone has detected and is anonymously reporting.

david.hendon

Surrey, UK

@jim_lewis said:

if somehow the lost item gets moved (the dog ran away with it!)

This is a real scenario. It was a cat not a dog, but I once by chance stopped our lovely Maine Coon puss from going out through the cat flap with my wife’s Omega wristwatch in his mouth. And some years later, I came out of the shower to find one of the next generation of Maine Coons playing “chase the mouse” across the bedroom floor with one of my hearing aids. I had forgotten to turn it off when I took it out of my ear before showering, so it was squeaking provocatively!

When animals are involved, anything is possible!

Grantham, Lincolnshire, UK

Tile think it is a good idea.

In reply to @david.hendon

@david.hendon said:

When animals are involved, anything is possible!

Cat, trying to get some attention, very politely!
https://1drv.ms/f/s!ApngLox0gfb7icd0s3mWi_3Zm-w9gg6