This question and answer is from the March Ear Talk webinar with Value Hearing founder Christo Fourie. You can find the full presentation on YouTube. If you would like to have your question answered live, leave a comment below RSVP to the next webinar which is on the first Wednesday of the month at 11am AEST.
Today's webinar revolves around Bluetooth.
Bluetooth is quite a nice feature in hearing aids but it's also quite bugbear for many people because of the technicalities involved.
So today I'm just going to try and explain that in simpler terms if possible and hopefully address most of your issues.
- We'll start off just looking at the history of Bluetooth hearing aids.
- We'll also look at the types of Bluetooth used in hearing aids.
- We'll look at the benefits of Bluetooth.
- We'll look at the limitations of Bluetooth.
- We'll look at troubleshooting Bluetooth or common Bluetooth issues and,
- We'll also look at any unanswered questions I may have missed as I go through this topic.
Types of Bluetooth Used In Hearing Aids
There's two main types of Bluetooth hearing aids.
The first is Bluetooth Low Energy and that's really designed to take as little power as possible from the hearing aid battery so your battery doesn't run down in unexpected time frames.
That's typically your Made-for-iPhone and also the ASHA (Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids) protocol which is the Android option, which is coming to light these days. Bluetooth Low Energy doesn't only do streaming, it does apps - so things like your remote control apps, remote fitting apps, those sort of things.
Phonak, for instance, uses Low Energy but its own proprietary streaming protocol for its TV unit which doesn't use as much power as Bluetooth Classic and it's also used when we program hearing aids wirelessly through Bluetooth.
So, all of them have that low energy option but then you also have Bluetooth Classic which really only comes from Sonova and that was in, first of all, in the Phonak Direct range, which wasn't great it could only stream a phone call to one ear. The Moxie All which had the same limitations then we got Marvel and Discover and also to Discover Next which was the next iteration of it, still on an older chip than we currently see in the Paradise. It could only connect one Bluetooth device at a time. It had some issues with drop outs, not quite as stable as others, but certainly a step up from the Moxie or the Direct.
Lately, we've got the Phonak Paradise which allows up to eight connections with two active connections. It’s much more stable, and again, an improvement on the previous generation.
As you can see, there are generational improvements with Bluetooth.
