Today’s hearing aids are more technologically advanced than ever before. This means that your provider can program your devices to be even more responsive to your exact type of hearing loss. It also means that your hearing aids contain more features and are compatible with a broader range of accessories, giving you greater flexibility to live your life the way you love to!
Believe it or not, one of the most common problems we and the entire hearing care community discuss with patients is related to the TV. That’s right. The television. The basic issue centers on what we’ll generously call “the volume wars.”
The person with the hearing difficulty is setting their television’s volume at a level that is simply too uncomfortable for their loved ones to stand for any prolonged period of time. Not only could this extreme volume be uncomfortable for others, but it also creates a situation where couples or families are living separate lives in their own home. This can be frustrating for all involved, and leaving a hearing difficulty unaddressed unfortunately can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences as they relate to a person’s health and their social and emotional well-being.
You deserve hearing care from experienced, effective providers
The good news is that many of these problems are solvable. The first step in solving them? Seeing a trusted hearing care provider, like those at Colorado Ear Care. Our founders literally grew up in the healthcare world (specifically in the hearing and dental care spaces) and were, on a daily basis, witness to the importance of building real relationships with patients, relationships based on communication and a tireless commitment to service.
Understanding a patient’s needs to best serve their experience is crucial to a great hearing care experience, which is exactly why we place such an emphasis on diagnostics. Your results — and your understanding of those results — will help guide our treatment recommendations. If it’s clear that you do have a hearing loss and that hearing aid technology is the best form of treatment for your type of hearing loss, we can then have a discussion about the different styles of technology that best suit your hearing health needs, your budget, and the way you live your life.
Today’s hearing aid technology is more adaptable than ever before
What do we mean when we talk about the best technology that suits the way you live your life? Well, not only are there many distinctions between hearing aid offerings based on the different levels of hearing loss they’re best suited to treat, but there are also a wide variety of different features that today’s digital hearing aids provide.
Some of the features that come standard with almost all contemporary digital hearing aids include directionality, which can help you more easily understand where sounds are coming from and how close those sounds are to you, which is important for safety among other factors; speech-in-noise capabilities, which can be extremely helpful if you find yourselves in noisier environments that make conversations harder to focus on and understand, like restaurants or sporting events; and even GPS capabilities that can remember different locations that you frequent and will automatically adjust your hearing aids’ settings to those environments so that you can always hear your best, whether or not you’re at home, at the coffee shop, in the office, or wherever matters most to you.
How hearing aids connect to the TV
Thanks to the advancements in hearing aid technology and, well, just about every other type of digital technology, your ability to wear hearing aids and enjoy the same things in the same way as those who don’t have a hearing loss is finally here. Televisions are no exception to this. Not only do you have the option to watch cable television, stream content directly to your TV from myriad streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, but you can also stream audio from your TV directly to your hearing aids!
How? Well, there are two basic ways that this can be done:
If you have a new, Bluetooth-enabled television set, then you can easily connect your hearing aids to your TV based on the instructions that your specific devices and television provide. This usually entails having your hearing aids’ Bluetooth connectivity capabilities turned on, finding those devices on your TV’s menu, and selecting the name of your hearing aids when they appear. This should start streaming audio to your hearing aids. Disconnecting them should be just as easy as deselecting them from the same menu on your TV.
Many hearing aid manufacturers offer an accessory that is called a “TV streamer,” which is compatible with a pretty wide range of hearing aids and televisions. The beauty of this device is that, once it’s connected to the TV, you have the ability to control the volume of the audio being streamed into your hearing aids and the audio the TV is putting out into the room separately. The beauty of this is that you can finally watch television with your loved ones at the distinct volumes most comfortable for each of you. It’s more than an end of the volume wars, it is very much a bridge that makes it possible for friends and family to spend more time together, watching and listening and conversing about the movies and shows they love. What a wonderful development!
How hearing aids connect to smartphones
Hearing aid and smartphone connectivity follows the same basic process as it does with the television, using Bluetooth connectivity to stream audio directly to your hearing aids. This means that phone calls, once difficult for hearing aid wearers, are now crisp, clear, and far more enjoyable for folks on both ends of the line.
These capabilities, of course, aren’t limited to phone calls. Video conferencing is equally heightened by Bluetooth audio streaming, which has been a fantastic development for travelling and remote-working professionals, long-distance relatives, and those who love to create video content for social media.
Just as these capabilities aren’t limited to phone calls, they’re also not limited to phones. These same capabilities can also be taken advantage of via tablets and desktop and laptop computers, and there are numerous hearing aid apps available from hearing aid manufacturers that can make your hearing experience that much richer. We are truly in an era where, with the right testing, treatment, and technology by your side, an aidable hearing loss doesn’t have to be a limiting experience.