This is a new one for me. Last night I had a large gathering in my apartment. Every night I put my rechargeable Resound’s in the charger. It always shows that I still have 60% charge left. Last night it showed only 20%.
I am wondering if it is because there was a lot of conversation and noise going on so consequently does the aid have to use more charge? I was rather shocked as I didn’t know that was a possibility.
In my experience, a firmware update will temporarily increase battery consumption. A second cause is locking into a software program (e.g.; speech in loud noise) that increases the draw. I don’t have even anecdotal information on which programs or how much. To some extent it is driven by your boost needs–i.e, your hearing deficiency.
This is a new one for me. Last night I had a large gathering in my apartment. Every night I put my rechargeable Resound’s in the charger. It always shows that I still have 60% charge left. Last night it showed only 20%.
This is just a wild guess. But the numbers seem to add up so I’ll proffer it to you. I’m guessing that perhaps, your charging process got interrupted somehow the night before. So you had 60% left before charging, something went wrong with the charge, you still had 60% left in the morning but maybe you didn’t notice that. So on the second day, the drew another 40% as they typically draw every day, so 2 consecutive days of use resulted in you seeing 100-40-40 = 20% on the second night.
It could also be due to the large gathering, too, causing the aids to do more processing than necessary, especially if you debunk my guess above because you were able to confirm 100% charge status on the HAs in the morning before you put the aids on. Then you can maybe chalk it up to the extra signal processing for the large gathering. If this is the case, it’s not necessarily the extra signal processing that’s draining the batteries faster, but more likely the amplification of more sounds continuously for a longer period that is draining the batteries, because the analog amplifiers are more likely the bigger power hogs over the digital processing circuitries.
Generally, digital circuitries don’t care whether the sounds they process are busy or quiet (in terms of power consumption), because the digital representation of the sounds are just ones and zeros, so they’re treated and processed simply as ones and zeros until it gets to the analog amplifiers that drive the receivers. Then the amplifiers will have to expend more energy to drive the louder sounds compared to less energy to drive the receivers if the sound is quiet.
Generally, digital circuitries don’t care whether the sounds they process are busy or quiet (in terms of power consumption), because the digital representation of the sounds are just ones and zeros, so they’re treated and processed simply as ones and zeros until it gets to the analog amplifiers that drive the receivers. Then the amplifiers will have to expend more energy to drive the louder sounds compared to less energy to drive the receivers if the sound is quiet.
Hello Volusiano.
I appreciate your soon reply. It was very insightful and intelligent. You are no doubt an engineer. I just tested my Aids a moment ago which have been in for 14 hours and they are still measuring 60% so obviously there is a drain or drag on the processing going on when there is so much conversation at one time. the get together was not even two hours although a few folks stayed a little longer so maybe they did stay two hours but apparently this was very taxing to my H A’s . When I awakened yesterday morning, they were charged at 100%.
Also kudo’s to the person who posted just above yours.
This quiet life I lead was happy to have all the noise and conversations. In the event, I am ever in this situation again for a longer period I think I may have to excuse myself and go and charge them for a half hour or so, and just pretend that I am so interested in everybody that I will just sit there quietly and pretend to listen as I would hardly hear anything at all. Good idea?
At the end of the day, if you still have 20%, then I don’t think you’d have to miss out on the gathering just to go recharge. But if you want to make sure you don’t run low unexpectedly, I think a better approach is to find some time BEFORE the gathering to recharge and top up the aids when you have some down time available to ensure that you won’t run out in the middle of the gathering.
I had an issue with my Phonak Audeo Paradise P90R’s. Rechargeable batteries.
I saved a program with changes using myPhonak app.
First time I used it was for a lunch that was very noisy. I forgot to get out of the saved program. Battery drain was massive. My hearing aids died about 3:00 pm (that was about 8 hours use). I make a point of going back to regular programs. I have some battery life left when I take my hearing aids out after 17 hours of use.
I just tested my Aids a moment ago which have been in for 14 hours and they are still measuring 60%
WHOA NELLY! You still have 60% after 14 hours of use??! I’d have maybe 20% by then, but as others have pointed out, if you put your aids into any program other than the default they start up with, you’ll drain the batteries faster.
Intriguing that there may be a charging issue. Be sure your charging station is PLUGGED IN, if a wall switch is needed to enable that socket, be sure it’s ON, and then seat the aids real careful. If you do all that and are still running out too fast it could be a charging issue or your phone’s operating system that needs updating.
After I installed Android 13 OS on my cell phone, I jumped from 11 hrs/day to 17.5hrs per day. Granted, this is PATHETIC compared to battery operated aids of years ago … but here we are! Not much in the way of choices.
Generally, digital circuitries don’t care whether the sounds they process are busy or quiet (in terms of power consumption), because the digital representation of the sounds are just ones and zeros, so they’re treated and processed simply as ones and zeros until it gets to the analog amplifiers that drive the receivers.
I’m guessing that they might activate additional processing steps (digital filters) when a higher noise level is detected. I really don’t know, just a guess.
I’m guessing that they might activate additional processing steps (digital filters) when a higher noise level is detected. I really don’t know, just a guess.
Digital circuitries don’t work like that, meaning that they don’t go dormant to save power when a low noise level is detected (thereby saving power drain), then they get activated when the signal shows a lot of noise.
Just the sampling rate for hearing aids alone are at 20 KHz, meaning that regardless of whether the input signal is hyperactive or dead quiet as a mouse, the A2D converter CONSTANTLY always samples at 20,000 times per second and converting the analog input signal into its ones and zeros equivalent.
After the input signal has been digitized, it goes through the (digital signal processors), and these guys are BUSY bees at work analyzing and processing the input signals. The filter banks after the A2D converters convert the input signal from the time domain into 64 channels of equal bandwidth to enable more advanced mathematical processing down the line.
The in the Oticon is forever CONSTANTLY busy as well, scanning and analyzing the input sound scene at the rate of 500 times per second to correctly map different sound sources. A quiet sound source doesn’t really shut off the DNN or part of the DNN to save power. It’s more about identification and distribution and processing accordingly, regardless of the content inside.
I can go on and on, but to not bore you with more details, maybe I can give an analogy. Back in the days of analog movies, a 2 hour movie will take up a big reel of film at 60 frames of film per second. Regardless of whether those frames are blank (black or white or a monotone color) instead of a very pretty and colorful picture, it’d still take 60 frames of the monotonous non-moving blank screen displayed on the screen, and the movie projector continues to keep reeling at a constant speed regardless, sucking up the same amount of power from the wall to light up that projector’s light bulb. The content of what’s on each of the frame doesn’t matter. The machine is designed to do its thing the same exact way regardless of the content in the movie.
Of course this is an over generalization, but hopefully you get the picture. Of course it all depends on the design. For digital circuitries, the power drain comes when the transistors inside a logic gate inside a circuit open and close to switch logic states. But digital signal processors operate at a much, much, much higher level than at the transistor level or the logic level. It’s more or less almost at a system level, as each DSP inside the SOC (System On the Chip) is kind of a system by itself, dealing at a much more abstract mathematical level for the most part. So minute tiny control over how to save power at the transistor or logic gate level is non-practical and not really a concern when you’re flying at a 20 thousand foot level. Power saving concern would be focused more on the efficiency of the analog components because they’re much more low lying fruits to reap, and also on the choice of the geometry of the silicon (the lithography scale) which will have to be balanced against the cost of going to lower, more advanced geometry for power saving.
If I didn’t know better, I’d SWEAR you are a TINY scientist living inside a pair of aids, walking about with a magnifying glass and notepad! I LOVE the details and facts you provide about how these gizmos work.
NO idea how or where you learn it, but I like reading about it, try to digest it all, and make sense of it.
Thank you, I’m an electrical engineer by training so it’s easier for me to understand or be able to guess better the technical side of hearing aids, I guess.
Well, just from reading this forum we know that power drain can vary by program. I recall Phonak speech in noise as one example. Extra drain comes from additional (s) being brought online I guess. Whatever the details of the power use, code could presumably be written to do more processing, at higher drain, when noise reaches a certain threshold within a program as well.
Thank you Volusiano for taking the time to write that full explanation of how ‘s work. It went way over my head, but there are many in this forum who are able to understand your engineering language and concepts.
The Lord bless you for giving you a brain that is able to know and understand even a tiny object one puts in his ear. That said, remember, the first computer needed a large room.
BTW your and my are similar.
I have mentioned this before, but will say it again. When I get to heaven, I will hear music and sound that I never even knew existed. It will be joyful beyond all words. I pray you and many others will also meet me there.
Well, just from reading this forum we know that power drain can vary by program. I recall Phonak speech in noise as one example. Extra drain comes from additional DSP(s) being brought online I guess. Whatever the details of the power use, code could presumably be written to do more processing, at higher drain, when noise reaches a certain threshold within a program as well.
I can’t speak for Phonak aids because I don’t monitor Phonak threads as closely as I do Oticon threads on this forum, simply because I don’t wear Phonak aids, of course. But I don’t ever recall seeing anybody wearing Oticon aids ever mentioned that they specifically made some kind of detailed scientific testing between the different environmental modes about power draw between the different modes.
To be able to reach a conclusive observation like you mentioned, they would need to have 2 sets of batteries, one set exclusively reserved for use when they’re in noisy environments only, and when they’re back in a quiet environment, they must swap back to the other set. Then if the set of batteries used for the noisy environments runs out of juice well before the set used for the quiet environments, then and only then can a scientific conclusion be drawn that noisy environments take up more power drain than simple and quiet environment.
BUT even so, that scientific conclusion DOES NOT imply that the power drain comes from the assumed guess that the which does the noise reduction is not deactivated due to how to code is written, like you have suggested. Nobody knows for sure where the majority of the power drain from the noisy environment comes from, whether it’s due to the digital DSP not having to do the noise reduction (like you assume), or whether it’s due to something else, because we are not the designer of the hearing aid, are we? But my educated guess tells me that it’s much more likely due to something else, and that something else is the analog amplifier that has to work extra hard to drive all the busy/noisy sound traffic in those noisy environments.
Even if the engineers are willing to invest to write codes to deactivate the DSP that does the noise reduction like you said (and I still highly doubt that the engineers would bother to go to this extreme length to do this due to very low return on investment), any amount of digital power drain saving from this DSP will be dwarfed by conparison to the amount of analog power drain it takes to amplify the busy sound traffic in the noisy environment.
So if you have read on this forum observations from posters that noisy environments seem to draw more power than when they’re in quiet or simpler environments, I would still maintain that it’s not because the DSP that does noise reduction is “woken up” and sucks up all that power. I would maintain that it’s because the analog amplifier has to work harder to amplify the higher-traffic sounds to the receivers, and it’s the analog amplifiers that is sucking up more power in this case.
Phonak requires more battery power in the speech in loud noise program.
The reason is their different approach to eliminate background noise with beam forming.
The signals from all 4 microphones (2 left and 2 right) are used to form a directional microphone.
This requires a high level of communication via radio between the two hearing aids. Which in turn requires a lot of battery power.
So yes, it has nothing to do with increased power.
Found your explanation really helpful. I’m a recent graduate mechanical engineer. 1971. Back then I thought I was an audiophile. Now I can’t hear the cymbals any more.
Until recently I thought the remedy to hearing better was to turn up the gain.
I’m grateful I have Phonak Audeo Paradise P90R’s. But the last two audiologists have only tuned up volume tohelp me hear better.
My new practitioner has finally made my hearing aids work for me. He found that my hearing aids weren’t linked. And the wrong domes were set. Previous audi had open domes; not specified.
I still have a lot of learning to do…I just want them to work. (Had issues today; and last night.)
Phonak requires more battery power in the speech in loud noise program.
The reason is their different approach to eliminate background noise with beam forming.
The signals from all 4 microphones (2 left and 2 right) are used to form a directional microphone.
This requires a high level of communication via radio between the two hearing aids. Which in turn requires a lot of battery power.
So yes, it has nothing to do with increased DSP power.
Actually Phonak’s approach on doing frontal beamforming is a very popular approach to eliminate background noise, used by practically all hearing aid brands/models. Even the Oticon hearing aids uses beamforming as well, and despite its open paradigm, it also provides an option to do frontalbeamforming if the user so wishes.
Specifically on beamforming, unilateral beamforming using just the 2 microphones on the single sided hearing aid is already enough to create a directional microphone effect. Not all 4 mics on both hearing aids are required to create directional mics. But there is a benefit to do bilateral beam forming to improve the signal to noise ratio further, most hearing aids do bilateral beam forming. Below is a link that talks about the benefit of bilateral beam forming vs unilateral beamforming.
Most communication between the left and the right hearing aids is done using (Near Field Magnetic Induction). This takes advantage of the fact that the 2 hearing aids are located in very close proximity of each other (the width of a person’s head), so instead of using radio type communication as required for longer distances, the NFMI is used for communication instead of radio communication (which is what is used for streaming for example), because NFMI takes a tiny fraction of the power compared to using radio communication.
NFMI is not used just for beam forming application between the 2 hearing aids only. Other applications like for application where data from the CROS hearing aid side that need to be sent to the hearing aid side of the good ear, or audio information to be sent from the other hearing aid necessary to create different kinds of spatial effects, also employ NFMI type communication between the 2 hearing aids.
Below is a link that talks more about NFMI. Also included is a screenshot of the page on NFMI on that same link. I know for sure that Oticon aids use NFMI to facilitate inter-hearing-aid communication. I can’t say for sure if Phonak uses NFMI or not, but I can’t imagine why not, because NFMI communication is not proprietary or exclusively patented, it’s just a form of communication, so it would be a no-brainer to use it instead of radio wave for inter-hearing-aid communication.
So if Phonak is indeed using radio communication instead of NFMI to create bilateral beamforming, then OK, it would take more power for speech in noise than normal. But if Phonak is using NFMI to create bilateral beamforming, then the additional power sap for speech in noise should not be that much more significant.
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