Exploring Hearing Aid Integration in iOS

The app on the watch also lets you switch between the programs on your hearing adis, and adjust things like speech focus or noise filter.

In the latest version of Watch OS, there is also a Control Panel feature that does the same thing as ReSound’s app.

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RE: Costco disabling the Remote Assist feature:
My Canadian audiologist said Costco does that because the hearing aid techs in the USA are not all Audiologists, and are not considered to have the necessary skillset to use Remote Assist.
However, Covid-19 is changing things, again. Apparently Costco is working to introduce this feature very soon - at least in Canada.

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Anson:

Thanks for the tip. My Oticons tend to get dislodged easily when I combine them with glasses and a mask all fighting for limited real estate on my ear.

There is another nifty feature I didn’t see mentioned in the article. Many MFi hearing aids allow for your audiologist to log in and program the hearing aids remotely. Each works a little differently. With Signia, you can make a programming request and submit it to your audiologist through the app. Your audiologist can then make programming adjustments and upload them to your phone. You’ll then have to accept the changes through the app. There are a few other brands that allow live changes to be made through the app during a virtual visit, like a FaceTime call. It’s a great way to get adjustments that can really help in specific environments, since you can submit the request while you’re experiencing issues rather than having to remember and tell your audiologist about them at your next in-person visit. I have some information on how virtual programming works at my clinic at https://linkaudiology.com/remote-hearing-aid-service/.

Thanks - I didn’t know about this. It seems that Signia TeleCare is available in Germany too; I’ll talk to my audiologist on my next visit.

Thank you so much for sharing a wonderful information with us. It was really nice to read a article written in this kind of topic. This article is extremely helpful exceptionally fascinating subject I am looking for that.One thing that I can’t figure out is how to get them to work when I answer a phone call on my Apple Watch. The phone rings in my hearing aids and on the Apple Watch, but when I touch to answer on my watch, the audio goes to my hearing aids, but only the microphone on the iPhone is activated. This is not convenient when I’m on my bicycle, and the iPhone is in my backpack. I would like to be able to talk to the Apple Watch and hear the audio in the hearing aids.

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Hi, thanks for your comments. I think we had a similar question a while ago - Exploring Hearing Aid Integration in iOS - #9 by randall.godfrey . I still don’t have a solution for this problem; my previous answer was:
“No suggestion, I’m sorry. It seems to me that you cannot switch between audio inputs in iOS as you can between audio outputs. Rather, choosing an audio destination seems to determine where the audio input comes from: AirPods → AirPods microphone, Apple Watch → Watch microphone, iPhone speaker → iPhone microphone, … , hearing aid → iPhone microphone.
Maybe an app to freely combine audio inputs and outputs is needed, like the Sound control panel in macOS.”

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Yeah, me too.
I was sort of shocked, well: sobered, when I realised that my first Apple Watch (Series 6) wouldn’t work as a microphone for telephony :frowning_face_with_open_mouth:

(seems true for iOS 15 beta and watchOS 8 beta as well)

Thanks for all the information in such a structured and complete way. Having changed from Signia to Oticon a few weeks ago, I’m going to try to use both devices, my iPhone and the iPad, with a connection to my Oticons.
I was looking around for some kind of automation to switch between them, but your article gives me the impression that it should work somehow seamless. Well, I’m still trying.

Right, it should work seamlessly, but you shouldn’t expect too much. While what I wrote in the article holds true, I found that in everyday usage often random noise was sent to my hearing aids when both the iPhone and the iPad were near me. In the end I deleted the hearing aids from the iPad (which I rarely use for things involving audio).

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