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thewayneI'm very glad to see this ruling. iPhones gained this compatibility some time ago, basically as long as I've been wearing hearing aids (9 years?). I imagine Android phones have had it for a similar period of time. It's really a boon for those of us who are hard of hearing. Otherwise, you're going to have more people flipping their phone to speakerphone and shouting more.
There's no specific timeline yet as to when all manufactured mobile phones must be compatible.
My hearing aids, Widex, are exceptionally cool. They have a three-band equalizer that lets me reshape the sound to a limited degree for the environment. I can reduce road noise in long drives, I can also apply a directional filter in noisy restaurants that makes it a bit easier to hear my wife when she's sitting next to me.
It's pretty amazing what they can do these days! But not all brands can do this. We have a new young woman working at the library who wears them, her brand and app can't do these things.
Two years ago the FCC opened up the market for third-party makers to produce hearing aids. It has had mixed success. These hearing aids aren't as powerful as the ones you get from an audiologist, and I don't know how tunable they are for specific correction curves.
Apple just released a new EarPod that has been approved by the FCC/FDA as a specific hearing aid, and with a recent model iPhone includes a hearing test capability. But there's a couple of problems with it. First, the battery is only good for about six hours of continuous use, I wear mine for typically twelve hours a day or more and replace the batteries every seven or eight days. Second, you have to wear those white pods in your ears all day long. I don't find them comfortable, and it looks like you're listening to music and tuning out the environment around you so you're less approachable to people. But the big problem is that currently they're only good for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. Me, I'm more on the scale of moderate to large hearing loss, so they'd probably be a non-starter for me. But I think they might be very good for a lot of people.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/17/all-mobile-phones-must-be-hearing-aid-compatible-under-new-fcc-rules/
https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/10/17/2049232/all-mobile-phones-must-be-hearing-aid-compatible-under-new-fcc-rules
There's no specific timeline yet as to when all manufactured mobile phones must be compatible.
My hearing aids, Widex, are exceptionally cool. They have a three-band equalizer that lets me reshape the sound to a limited degree for the environment. I can reduce road noise in long drives, I can also apply a directional filter in noisy restaurants that makes it a bit easier to hear my wife when she's sitting next to me.
It's pretty amazing what they can do these days! But not all brands can do this. We have a new young woman working at the library who wears them, her brand and app can't do these things.
Two years ago the FCC opened up the market for third-party makers to produce hearing aids. It has had mixed success. These hearing aids aren't as powerful as the ones you get from an audiologist, and I don't know how tunable they are for specific correction curves.
Apple just released a new EarPod that has been approved by the FCC/FDA as a specific hearing aid, and with a recent model iPhone includes a hearing test capability. But there's a couple of problems with it. First, the battery is only good for about six hours of continuous use, I wear mine for typically twelve hours a day or more and replace the batteries every seven or eight days. Second, you have to wear those white pods in your ears all day long. I don't find them comfortable, and it looks like you're listening to music and tuning out the environment around you so you're less approachable to people. But the big problem is that currently they're only good for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. Me, I'm more on the scale of moderate to large hearing loss, so they'd probably be a non-starter for me. But I think they might be very good for a lot of people.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/17/all-mobile-phones-must-be-hearing-aid-compatible-under-new-fcc-rules/
https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/10/17/2049232/all-mobile-phones-must-be-hearing-aid-compatible-under-new-fcc-rules
no subject
Date: 2024-10-18 04:02 pm (UTC)No reason not to.
Hugs, Jon
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Date: 2024-10-18 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-18 09:30 pm (UTC)Yeah, that's the new EarPod/AirPod/whatever. Out now, fully approved.
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Date: 2024-10-18 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-19 01:59 am (UTC)You don't like the speaking in your ears or the ringing notification? My Apple Watch vibrates to notify me a couple of seconds before any ringing starts, which is nice, my phone never actually rings if my hearing aids are on!
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Date: 2024-10-21 05:00 pm (UTC)But now that you mention it, I can set my watch to vibrate instead of ring which is probably what I should do.
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Date: 2024-10-18 10:37 pm (UTC)However, back when I had an iPhone, using the hearing aids like earpods drained their batteries like nobody's business. Not so good.
And perhaps because I worked for Apple, and was usually running beta software or worse, the connection was unreliable.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-19 02:03 am (UTC)That's interesting about the chip set! My understanding is it's just Bluetooth LE connecting the hearing aids to the phone, maybe it was a not fully standards compliant set? I do experience increased battery drain if I do a lot of streaming of audio content. I don't think the drain increases with long or numerous phone calls, hard to say. The only truly unreliable connection that I've had was iOS 11. That OS was just absolute garbage when it came to hearing aids. I don't know what they did, but they totally screwed over hearing aid users, and not just Widex - apparently all brands were affected! I actually fell back to an older iPhone that was on v10, it was so bad! I'd switch over to my v11 phone whenever updates came out in hope that they'd fixed it, but apparently the bugs were too deeply baked into the OS and the fix was iOS 12.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 04:27 am (UTC)