Hearing Aids and Bluetooth Issues

[Music] hi there welcome back to value hearing youtube channel i'm emma i'm a clinical audiologist and today i'm going to talk about bluetooth now bluetooth is a topic on our lips in audiology almost every single day because it has become part and parcel of having hearing aids for most people so bluetooth is a fantastic technology but it does have its limitations so what bluetooth actually is in case you don't know because we all take it for granted nowadays it was invented in around the early 90s and it was designed to remove cables as simple as that it was designed originally to be used for wireless headphones great technology a real breakthrough at the time it has become universal so it's in every electronic device that is wireless nowadays so it became quite obvious that this would turn up in hearing aids at some point and it's been going on for just under 10 years that we've had some version of bluetooth in hearing aid technology so with the bluetooth at the moment with the current hearing aids it is working better than it used to because bluetooth has certainly evolved a lot in its versions over the years but there are still some limitations in that bluetooth and it can be very easy to think that it is the hearing aids fault when it's not working but often it's just the nature of bluetooth i'm afraid so one of the wonderful things about bluetooth is that it's fairly low energy so it doesn't take up a lot of battery in comparison to things like wi-fi for example from your phone and your hearing aids you will certainly notice if you're using the bluetooth a lot that the battery life of both your phone and your hearing aid will be less than if you're not but in comparison to other options out there bluetooth is really wonderful essentially the limitation in bluetooth that most of our clients report is the the distance issue is that it only works up to 10 meters and they often don't realize that that if you walk out of the room while streaming music or on a phone call and leave your phone behind more than 10 meters away it will cut out it won't maintain that connection in most cases when you come back into that room it will reconnect again and i know this can be annoying but it's just a limitation of bluetooth so your best bet is really not to leave your phone more than 10 meters away when you're in the middle of talking or conversing or if you're perhaps listening to music or an audiobook have the phone a little bit closer so another limitation of bluetooth is that it does get affected by what else is happening on the phone because bluetooth is supposed to be quite efficient it can often be de-prioritized so if your phone's got lots of other things happening in the background pearl bluetooth can sometimes suffer so sometimes if you're having a lot of issues with bluetooth in fact not just sometimes almost always it's because the phone is busy dealing with all the other apps and whatnot running in the background so it may look like your apps are closed but often there are things happening in the background you're not aware of so please restart your phone or do a hard reset off your phone if you're an apple user but it's a case of the first thing that we really recommend our clients do when they're having bluetooth problems the first thing is restart the phone and that often actually solves the problem if that doesn't solve the problem check in your bluetooth pairings that the hearing aids are definitely still paired sometimes strange things can happen accidentally or issues can happen with other apps where the connection the pairing has just disappeared so sometimes you just need to start from scratch and repair the hearing aids through the app or through the settings the other thing that happens quite regularly is that the app just seems to not want to connect to the hearing aids so if you've already tried resetting the phone and you've already tried repairing them then sometimes your best thing to do is maybe actually delete the app and reinstall it or check if there are some updates available another thing that we definitely always check when someone's having bluetooth issues as well is that their software is up to date on their phone so we're all guilty of this that an update comes through from apple or samsung or whatnot and we ignore it because we don't want to have to deal with the changes and who can blame us it can get really frustrating but a lot of those changes affect bluetooth so it's really really important that when a software update comes from your phone manufacturer please do it you will notice a lot less issues in the future with bluetooth and speaking of which do have a little bit of patience sometimes in knowing that if apple or samsung have made a big update often the hearing aid manufacturers then have to run to the drawing table and find a way to update their app or their hearing aids as well so bearing in mind that that can sometimes happen and apple are not always communicating directly with the hearing aid manufacturers so it can take time sometimes to catch up this is i believe getting better as bluetooth is in fact improving as it's updated we're having less issues so another limitation of bluetooth can be it does receive some interference so generally it's actually big large bodies of water that cause this to be an issue so your body being one large body of water is certainly an issue at times if you've got your phone in one pocket and you're transmitting to a hearing aid on the other side it can sometimes be an issue because our bodies are obviously about 60 water here in australia we have lots of large bodies of water which can certainly interrupt the transmission of bluetooth and interfere with it so do you have some patience if you're having issues with the bluetooth transmission move around and see if you can get a better reception between your phone and your hearing aids the other thing that can interrupt it are things like microwaves and fridges at home for example so be conscious of where you're standing when you're taking your phone calls and what other equipment is around you so if you're in your office and it's full of lots of electronic equipment you may find that it does interfere with the bluetooth a little bit so it sounds like bluetooth is getting a bit of a bad rap here in this video it really does have its limitations and it's because it's universal that we've all ended up with it it's everywhere so it just makes sense to use bluetooth for every possible connection that we need but it really is amazing technology so there you have it bluetooth and hearing aids i hope you found this video helpful i know it was a lot of information but really if you just take it one step at a time you'll usually be able to figure out the issue for any questions leave a little comment in the box below for any suggestions of other videos that you'd like us to make here at value hearing please again make the suggestion in the little comments box below if you like this video like and share it it really helps increase our reach thank you so much for taking the time to watch today

Channel: Value Hearing

Views: 16,096

Rating: 4.8935361 out of 5

Keywords: hearing aids, hearing aids and bluetooth, hearing aids and bluetooth issues, hearing aids and bluetooth troubleshooting, yt:cc=on

Id: It8u74mb8Qg

Length: 7min 39sec (459 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020