Your Smartphone and your Hearing Aids

Smartphones offer countless options to make everyday activities easier. Through built-in settings and downloaded apps, technology can improve the daily lives of people who wear hearing aids or who have tinnitus.

In the general settings of smartphones, there are accessibility settings that allow people with disabilities to optimize certain functions. You can modify different features related to hearing, visual, or motor needs regardless of the mobile operating system.1,2

For example, some smartphones can receive calls or make you listen to videos directly in your hearing aids.

Also, captioning option can be activated to improve your understanding of the smartphone’s voice content. Other options, such as Live Transcribe and Sound Notifications, allow hearing-impaired people to read the content of a conversation and the surrounding sounds on their phone in real time. You can also receive notifications and light alerts if the doorbell rings or the smoke detector goes off.

The Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store offer several downloadable apps to support hearing-impaired people in their daily lives.

As with the accessibility settings on smartphones, the free version of Ava—Captions for All also provides speech transcription in group settings. The app can even translate a conversation in a foreign language.

Several hearing aid manufacturers have developed apps to mitigate the effects of tinnitus. For example, the Zen and Relax apps allow you to set up a soothing background sound that you can listen to with your hearing aids, headphones or a Bluetooth speaker. Many apps also contain useful tips for managing and masking tinnitus.

Other manufacturers have developed an application that enables a translation feature. It allows you to hear a conversation translated by the application directly in your hearing aids.

For more information, ask your audioprosthetist about it.

*An assessment by an audioprosthetist is required to determine which hearing aid suits the patient’s needs.

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