Technology

That fucking sucks, and as someone who wears hearing aids it’s very relatable. Hearing aids are an investment that last about 5-10 years. As a teenager I got some demo units, then when I absolutely couldn’t keep them working anymore about a decade later and had the money I upgraded them.

In practical terms this is about 15 years of advancement, and it shows. Gone are the days of molds of your ear, replaced by little domes that rest in the canal. But more relevant to the story, you used to have about a week per battery, and very little tech beyond some computation, volume adjustment, phone mode, etc. To turn them off you’d take out the battery.

My current ones didn’t have options for removable batteries, only rechargeable, nor for if you have Bluetooth. You can control volume on the device and that’s it, the rest is in an app. Now overall this has been better than I thought it would be. Tv gets beamed into my ears, as do phone calls. My batteries never die unexpectedly.

However, I hate that app. Partly it’s having to pull out my personal phone at my desk to turn my ears off (open offices are the root problem but sometimes I just can’t do sound at the moment, a common experience for the hard of hearing). I also dislike how there’s no custom naming for modes (meeting mode is called church mode because hearing aid manufacturers don’t understand that not all deaf people are elderly).

But mostly it’s the damn Bluetooth, that wonderful terrible Bluetooth. There is no “search for new devices” option, it happens automatically when removing from the dock/charger as part of turning on. But worse than that there’s no “forget device” option. And any time a device sends messages to the hearing aids it prioritizes most recent. This is a dangerous combination with apartment living. It’s unlikely to go bad, but for me it did and holy hell it was frustrating to have less control over my medical devices than headphones. I couldn’t wear my hearing aids at home until my audiologist got in contact with the manufacturer and reset the devices because randomly my tv, audiobook, or amplification of my wife’s voice would cut to my neighbors device where they were clearly frustrated because they’d be turning it off and on and I’d be swapping my device in app and it’d get switched back as new device tries talking… It was clear that the designers were too afraid of the users breaking things by having control to allow us to fix things that “just worked” their way into a real problem. And if I weren’t a technologically skilled young woman I probably wouldn’t have been able to sufficiently describe the problem to get it solved