My wife lost one of her hearing aids several hours ago while we were raking leaves and piling them in the street.
Using The “Easy Line Remote” App and choosing “Connect” after roaming the entire yard, I was able to finally “connect” using Easy Line to the lost hearing aid when I approached the (huge) leaf pile on the street in front of our house, so, I assumed that the hearing was probably somewhere in the pile of leaves.
The Bluetooth “connect” range seems to be up to a 50’ radius, so, I circled the pile about 30’ away and the app stayed connect to the aid all of the way around, so I was pretty sure that the aid was somewhere in the pile.
It took me a while to figure out my next step. I made sure the other aid was in the house and on the charger.
I then ran the lost hearing aid’s volume to maximum using the Easy Line Remote app.
I started a popular streaming music station on her phone and ran the volume of that podcast to maximum.
On my hands and knees (I have pretty good hearing) I crawled slowly around the leaf pile with my head as close to the leaves as possible without touching them. Our street still had regular traffic well after dark, so I had to stop until each car was at least a block away.
When I went around to the street side of the pile, my main job was to convince my distraught wife to forget the hearing aid and to shine the flashlight at oncoming cars to avoid things getting worse by being hit by one of them.
Finally, about 1/3rd of the way up the backside of the 25’ long leaf pile, I finally heard (very faintly) the music station.
I moved back and forth to get centered on the music, and when I did, I started pulling leaves out of the pile where the music was audible. When I put my head back to where I originally heard the music, it was gone so that meant that the aid was now probably somewhere in the leaves that I had pulled out of the pile.
We started to sort through leaves from that part of the pile and spread them (between passing cars) to try and hear it again, but I couldn’t. My wife visually spotted the aid after several false alarms among the twigs and wet leaves.
SUCCESS!
A couple of notes… first, because of battery life, the search using the above process needs to be started as soon as possible and be done by someone with good hearing.
Quiet is essential… don’t make any sounds such as touching the leaves as you try to listen to the location you have determined is where the aid is.
The “Easy Line Remote” App is not stable. When doing the initial “connect” attempts, the app times out quickly and I found when that happens, the apps connect process is compromised. To deal with this, I went to the app’s “Info” option and then issued a “Force Stop” and then went back to the “connect” screen. I probably had to do this at least a half dozen times during this search… what this does is gives the app a “fresh start”
For the final locator process, I have an (android) app named “Dog Whistle Pro” (which is no longer available) but it allows tapping and holding a frequency icon that results in a tone being generated while you touch the icon… this silence/sound contrast helps zero in on the aid.
There is a “find my headset”16 app that does something similar… don’t know it, but hope that someone posts results using it or another app to do the same.
Hope this saga helps others in similar circumstances.
Beverly Howard
This post edited on Jan 12/22 to clarify and expand the search process.
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Switzerland
Methuen, MA