Using Your Hearing Aids With a Smartphone

There are a lot of things that those with hearing aids are going to need to know about if they are to be able to get the most out of them. When you experience hearing loss, you are obviously going to want to know that the solution you have been given is the ideal one for you and your situation, and in many cases a hearing aid will be exactly that solution. But you will need to ensure that you know what you are doing with it, otherwise who knows whether you are going to make proper use of it as you would like to. In this post, we will discuss specifically the issue of using your hearing aid with a smartphone, and all that this implies.

The features

You might well be wondering why you would want to use your hearing aid with a smartphone, but there are actually many great reasons why this might be beneficial for you. Some of the most interesting and useful features of this technology are:

• Streaming phone calls to your hearing aid
• Change volumes in each hearing aid
• Check the status of the batteries
• Stream audio
• Control any accessories you might have for your hearing aids

As you can see, there are many great features that make using a hearing aid with a smartphone particularly encouraging and exciting, and it is something that more and more people are turning to do in recent years. If you are enthralled by this idea and you would like to know what you can do to make it a reality, it’s actually very straightforward.

The right hearing aids

Before you can do this, you are – of course – going to have to make sure that you have a hearing aid that is suitable for such a feature. Not all hearing aids are made to work with smartphones, so you will need to see whether yours is. If it is not, then you might want to contact your hearing instrument specialist (HIS) to see whether they can arrange anything for you which might be helpful in this sense. With the right hearing aids installed, you can then move on to ensuring that you are using them with your smartphone, which is something that – as we have seen – can really make a profound difference to your experience of having hearing aids in the first place.

For Android phones

How you actually use the hearing aids in relation to your smartphone will depend largely on what kind of smartphone you have, and this is where it gets technical. Firstly, let’s take a look at Android, one of the major operating systems for smartphones anywhere in the world. If you have an Android phone, then it is important to appreciate that not every hearing aid is going to work with it. However, many will, and for those that do work there are some fantastic apps that you might want to look into using in order to make the most of your experience with your hearing aids. It’s also worth remembering that you will almost always need a clip to connect so that you can stream sounds and so on, so make sure that you have one of those particular accessories.

Then it is just a case of downloading the specific app for your hearing aid brand, turning on the Bluetooth connection on your phone, pairing the phone to your hearing aids and launching the app – ensuring that your hearing aids are on.

For iPhones

Again, there are lots of iPhones that you can use in relation to hearing aids, and the features are going to be very similar compared to Android phones, as is the process of connecting. You need to go to the settings in your phone, turn on the Bluetooth setting so that your smartphone can find the hearing aids, go to accessibility and then to MFI Hearing Devices, and then tap on the model that represents your hearing aid. Then the devices will pair, and they will be ready to use together as soon as that.

As you can see, it should be fairly straightforward to be able to use your hearing aids with your smartphone, but you do need to make sure that you have the right phone, and that your hearing aids are compatible too. If you’d like to know more about this topic, get in touch with us at The Hearing House today at 715-384-4700. We will be more than happy to offer you some assistance.