Like many other devices, hearing aids are getting smarter every day. They’re also less conspicuous and more stylish than they ever have been. The average American is older, reports The Us Census Department, as the whole population gets older, and hearing loss is, unfortunately, really common, particularly in older adults. Roughly 37.5 million American adults and rising say they have some level of hearing loss.
The good news is hearing technology has had some exciting advancements recently that will provide more solutions for dealing with hearing loss. Here are just a few of the developments coming our way.
Your Overall Health Can be Tracked by Your Hearing Aids
Hearing aids are as good if not better than a fitness tracker at keeping track of many vital signs. Not only can it keep track of step count, how many calories were burned, the total number of steps you took and heart rate, it also checks the time in between heartbeats to help find any cardiovascular concerns. They are even working on technology that can measure blood pressure, oxygenation of the blood and other significant vital signs. Hearing aids also often have other pluses, including the ability to help drown out tinnitus and will help you hear generally so that your social life will improve also. Actually, social interaction has been connected to your overall health as well, so actually it’s another health metric we should be following. With these new hearing aids, you won’t even need a fitness device or smartwatch because the hearing aids can sync to your smartphone so you can listen to your tunes.
Smarter and Easier Streaming
Staying connected to your virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa is getting to be more important as people get more attached to these features. Even if using these assistants is not your thing, hearing aids with Bluetooth allow you to stream sound from any Bluetooth device like your phone or smart TV. Consider the benefits of this: You could hear the play-by-play in the big game clearly over your family’s cheers (or at least steer clear of getting yelled at for having the volume too high). The ability to directly stream phone calls, music, shows and more right to your ears not only helps you hear and appreciate them more, but it will also help you handle your hearing loss discreetly.
Automatic Adjustments
Have you noticed that you get ads from Goodreads and they seem to already know what type of books you like to read? Or how Amazon somehow know which products to suggest? That’s because big data and artificial intelligence are very powerful. Modern hearing aids can also make adjustments automatically based on your responses in the past. It will notice how you prefer to turn down the volume when you enter the train station and do that automatically the next time it recognizes you’ve entered the station (or any other situation with a lot of background noise). They are expanding this technology to include crowdsourcing as well, enabling information from other users to inform your hearing aids that you’re approaching a loud zone. Over time you will be able to adjust quickly to changes in the hearing environment because your hearing aid will make suggestions based on all the information it has collected.
You Won’t Have to Keep Replacing Those Little Batteries
Who wants to continuously wrestle with hearing aid batteries? Rechargeable hearing aids are now available. While you can do a lot to help extend the life of your hearing aids’ batteries, truth be told…it’s still aggravating and pricey. Better still, technology to recharge your hearing aids while they are still in your ears is being developed.