Rechargeable Hearing Aids - What You NEED to Know! | The Dr. Cliff Show

want to learn all about the pros and cons of rechargeable battery hearing aid technology then you need to watch this episode of the Dr Cliff show hey guys welcome back to the Dr Cliff show I'm Cliff Olson doctor of Audiology and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix Arizona and I am joined once again today on the show with my co-host Dr Rachel cook and Dr Kelsey Beck welcome back to the show thanks thank you all right good morning good morning yes so um today we're talking all about rechargeable hearing aid technology pros and cons of it what different manufacturers are are doing when it comes to rechargeable devices because not all of them are done exactly the same way um before we get started I'd really like to kind of like go back in the history of rechargeable hearing aids um I remember back when I was in grad school I was actually my fourth year externship so this would have been 2015 or so um I had I saw my first pair of rechargeable hearing aids they were uh uh well not signia they were seens because that hadn't yet been sold uh the company and so there were seen rechargeable devices and they were actually nickel metal hydride Battery Technology so you would actually have you know battery doors that would open and close they would only work with the rechargeable version of these batteries and it was very hard to tell these batteries from a regular disposable battery they look identical so if you ever took out the battery and you had other batteries on your desk anywhere you'd be like hm which one of these are actually rechargeable you know like if you picked up the wrong one it's not going to work you know that's true that's true uh the only problem was is that I had a patient who had dead batteries but they wanted to for some reason keep the dead ones and get replacement ones in them so we were able to order them Replacements and they weren't they weren't like dead dead they were out of battery okay and they they still would give them a couple hours of charge so they could charge them every couple of hours and get use out of them and I had taken them out and I didn't even realize this cuz I was I was a student and and no one had ever really this the first time I've ever seen a freaking rechargeable hearing aid and so I I can essentially I ended up throwing it in the trash I had to dig around in the trash to find that rechargeable battery that had no charge in it and it ended up I could see very subtle differences between that battery and a disposable battery so that was my first experience ever with rechargeable and I'm like this rechargeable thing is not going to go well I was going to say yeah that's not a good first experience as you're digging in the trash like I'm never doing this again ever again ever again so valuable learning experience but uh shortly after that I want to say within a year after that there was a company called Z power that actually came out with a silver zinc battery and uh the that actually looked like it it called Silver zinc but it had a gold plate on it to control the like current or something with the battery because it was interchangeable with the Disposable battery which was crazy I remember going to a conference the ada8 conference in 2016 and and this was out in California and they had a booth and I'm like wow this is really cool but I remember thinking to myself and I you guys already know this is that um I was extremely cautious when it came to that particular Battery Technology because it was so new and one thing you guys know about me that maybe some other people know about me is that I'm a very late adopter when it comes to new technologies especially uh back in 2016 you know good8 years ago um I still had a flip phone at the time and in 2016 as an audiologist at that point and um I just remember being like I want to see how this plays out and so how how did that play out uh it wasn't great not so well it wasn't great so in theory fantastic I still have patients today asking me why don't they come out with a hearing aid that can use both a rechargeable and a disposable and I'm like great question let me tell you why not um just sit down kids Let Me Tell you the story back in my um yeah but I think um when we were talking earlier we were bringing up this idea you know it's really difficult for hearing aid manufacturers to take a new type of Technology like rechargeable it takes time to refine it and even with disposable Battery Technology it took time to get it there so when you take a device that has both um this idea of kind of switching out the battery doors and retrofit fitting the device to have either a disposable battery door or rechargeable battery door you're just introducing a lot of new parts and a lot of new problems and that's exactly what happened um very quickly the companies that came out with zowed devices found out that they were having exorbitantly high repair rates on these devices and ultimately each of these companies ended up replacing these devices with just fully rechargeable hearing aids once they became available because the whole thing went so poorly that they said we have to fix this because now people will never use our company again well I think it was a really interesting idea because I remember being at the conference and they're like oh okay so like let's say the Odon open hearing aids were really new when this all happened it's like oh you can actually take off the Disposable battery door off of the Odon hearing aid you can retrofit this new battery door that we've created with our silver zinc batteries and it will essentially give you a really good actually give you pretty good battery life you could get through the whole day on one of these batteries the problem is that they would fail so often and you're like okay well now it's not even charging anymore and you're a month into using it like you said it happen so often that people are like can I just like go back to my other hearing aids now it started off as a retrofit then they actually started getting contracts with manufacturers to be like okay let's actually build your hearing aids with this technology still ran into the same issues with that yeah I will say that it is really nice that the companies who did adopt it really early on they did try to make it right by all of their users um by really either replacing their devices or you know they really Tred they made it really easy to just get new devices because it was on their part they're like yeah no we messed this up this is not great and so I think that that's a really awesome example too of you know the company's doing right by people as well so I think that's very important to highlight and I think that Z power it was actually really impressive I got to be a part of a you know where they companies will fly audiologists out and they'll do like what do they call that like a focus group kind of thing they're like okay tell us the the problems that you see like what things could you what would benefit you as a clinician inside of your offices I bet you never got invited back and uh well um yeah because they didn't actually continue on in the hearing it industry for much longer after that I think that they they were very open and receptive to our feedback they really wanted to make it work you could tell that they were like they they really wanted this to be a thing where people could go rechargeable you know it's better for the planet if you can go rechargeable in a lot of ways um it just it just didn't pan out I want to say I had about 7,000 subscribers on the YouTube channel when I went out there uh for that and I had talked about that technology on the channel before uh and how it maybe didn't go so well um but they were very open and receptive I still know a number of audiologists who are a part of that focus group as well and everyone was giving brutally honest feedback for that but I think it eventually got to the point where they realized that this wasn't sustainable the heing a manufacturers were like you know we're just going to like pull this inhouse so we can have complete control over quality assurance and all of that um and that was really kind of when lithium technology was starting to take off as well which is kind of the next iteration of of rechargeable so I will say there are still Z power batteries out there in the wild uh the company itself actually ended up going bankrupt out of business I don't know how to word it they pivoted they actually went there I I want to say that there's a lot of like Bose devices that are out there that are using that technology and I'm not 100% sure about this but the Bose sleep buds 2 uh they didn't come out with a newer version of that but those were using a Z power developed battery because it's gives you good battery life and it's safe right A lot of people freak out about lithium and catching fire and stuff like that which actually happened in my hometown there was a factory that was like storing lithium batteries and it went up in Flames but uh so from a safety perspective bows like that cuz people are going to be sleeping in those um I don't think they brought it back and now there's another startup company that's basically creating devices that look exactly like the Bose sleep buds too that might also be using that technology I'm not sure well I had a patient actually call literally last week asking where can I find a Z power battery for my probably eBay for like 200 bucks a battery it's like 300 bucks battery out um and they said can you believe it and I said yeah I can believe it um they have been wiped ESS off of the consum market if you will um but if you think about it if that came out in 2016 or so and we're just now hitting 2024 if we always say that the average lifespan on hearing aids is between 5 and seven years then it definitely makes sense that there are still some people out there that are using the devices that can go back and forth but it's a very small number of individuals yeah and those rechargeable batteries even going back to nickel metal hydrate it was kind of like a understood that every year you just need to replace it because you'll start off with I remember the nickel metal hydride was like 11 hours of battery life a day and then by the end of the year you'd be at like 8 hours a day and so you'd replace it get back up to the 11 because every time that you recharge it and and deplete it that that you know costs a cycle and it depletes the the life overall life of the battery um and same obviously issues with the the silver zinc technology is that it depletes uh we still have the same issue with lithium batteries now lithium batteries don't have this memory to where like you need to only depleted a certain amount or depleted all the way before you recharge it we don't have to worry about that stuff but at the same time you end up going 3 years with the lithium battery and you might have had 24 hours of battery life when you first started and now you're down to like you know 12 or or 15 hours of battery life so and to be fair if you're down to 12 15 hours of battery life for a lot of people that's like the time they're awake and so they're still getting all day use out of it maybe every now and again if they have like a really long day they come home shower for dinner or what have you they you know put their hearing aids in the charger for a little bit you get the rest of the day anyway so I mean even still just talking about from 2016 to now you know having to replace them every year now we're in 2024 you know having to go every three years maybe replacing the battery like that's a huge jump in a pretty short amount of time from a technology standpoint for sure and I guess we can what thank Tesla for that I don't know I mean lithium is around a lot longer than what Tesla has been but um that really has been the technology that has taken off we're probably going to see more advancements in the rechargeable battery uh category but you know you start looking at like lifespan of hearing aids to your point is that phonak actually rates their batteries for six years they say that if you use this consistently every day this battery will last you six years um I don't know if I've ever seen like like that happen cuz when did they first release they were the phonak AO bong devices came in rechargeable that was I'm guessing around 2017 or so and so now we're basically at year seven but pretty much everybody upgrades their technology yeah before 6 Years anyway yeah I guess it's difficult to say yeah I and I think too that you know the reason a lot of people upgrade is because every couple of generations from a hearing perspective there is a big enough difference where you're actually going to notice how you're hearing differently and so you might not even get to that you know seven-year time frame because well maybe it just makes sense to do it sooner because the technology on from the from you know other perspective get so much better too um and even still I mean you can still always anytime that like you send devices in for repair let's say even if it's not the battery a lot of times they'll just replace all of the internal components anyway um and so sometimes you even get a new battery on accident right because even that's though that's not what was supposed to be being fixed um so I don't know either that I've seen one that hasn't been replaced prior to that because for some reason it's probably just easier for them to you know pop out all the components put in new components and be good to go or just replace the unit entirely which we've seen happen yeah the time it would take to actually go through and diagnose the true problem in every single hearing aid that's being sent in for repair even if it's outlined in the repair form of you know it's creating static and I know it's coming from the microphone because the speaker's fine but the microphone's not or whatever it may be still they're not going to risk sending it back and not having that problem corrected and having it sent back again and again so yeah what do we see on most of our invoices when we get them back from repair electronics replaced components replaced uh electronics and housing replace I'm like isn't that the whole hearing whole thing that's a there's not many more parts in that but yeah totally so okay of course now we're primarily on to lithium battery technology I'm trying to think off the top of my head if there's any other Technologies out there right now re chargeable they even exist and nickel metal hydrate is pretty much gone uh silver zinc pretty much gone unless paying 300 bucks for a battery uh online and I know it has gold in it but it ain't $300 wor of gold I can tell you that um so we're pretty much all on lithium but there's different ways that different manufacturers will actually implement the charging of their lithium batteries um we have the contact charging which are like the metal contacts that make physical contact inside of a charger case to give it a charge and you have inductive charging which is essentially wireless charging where where you don't have any contacts that to get the charge into the the battery and then I guess kind of like a quasi form of contact charging would be the galvanic charging that signia is known for and it seems to have gotten them better battery life uh but there are pros and cons of these different forms of charging oh definitely contact charging for sure that we first saw like with the belong AO devices the marbles and even moving into the paradise devices um you know when they have to make contact it's really important that the placement of these devices in the charger is correct and appropriate and what we found especially with I'm just going to name off the phone act devices was that with those first couple iterations of the charger it was really difficult to get them back out of the charger um I remember working at the VA with many many veteran patients who you know didn't always have the best dexterity and half the time they were able to get them in without a problem but getting them out I mean you had to hold the charger with one hand Rock the hearing aid forward with the other and then pull at the same time and for a many people that was that was way too much so one of the disadvantages of the contact charging was the fact that you had to have this perfect placement and get good contact or they weren't going to charge appropriately mhm yeah well to your point as well um even today like people will come back in with their devices and say oh like every now and then it just it's just not charged in the morning like it's flashing red and it's like did it start flashing red once you adjust it trying to get it out and they're like yeah like M so what actually was in the charger overnight and it just whenever you do put it in just make sure that it is in fact flashing one of those lights at you before you close the lid that way you don't wake up with that challenge um same thing with contacts as well is that if there's any dirt or debris on those contacts whether it's on the hearing aid or inside the charger itself that will also um uh not allow you to charge the hearing aid fully and so oftentimes I'll still have patients bring their Chargers in so I can take a look at it and make sure that if there is anything that's building up that we get it cleaned out yeah that actually brings up a great point if you are experiencing any sort of issues with your hearing aid charging um or perhaps just not charging reliably in the way that you would like make sure you take your charger to your provider's office with you please please please because so often I hear something happened with my hearing aid battery and I'm like okay great can I take a look at your charger oh I don't have it I'm like oh well I don't know if that's the problem or not now so see you again tomorrow so bring them with you and you know we've all had the case of where someone brings their charger in like I don't know why it's not charging in here and it's like and you look down inside and like what what are some things that you guys have found inside of charger cases unmentionables I don't even want to literally I think I I think it was like part of a Dorito potato chip that I saw not shocking yeah I did find a bug inside somebody's mon like it had gotten squished on the contact UM that was that's probably the most interesting thing that I found but really more over is that you know um I also have found that you know a lot of people don't always clean their hearing aids uh as effectively as they're supposed to whether that's you know they weren't taught how to do it or or whatever there's a number of reasons that hearing needs don't get cleaned but every time you don't clean the devices and you put them in the same box over and over day after day year after year things do get inside the charger and I don't and I think that to we just don't think about the charger as being something that needs to be maintained right and it does definitely does so that's for contact charging then we also have the inductive charging now uh speaking of PHX specifically again is that they have the life version of their AO hearing aids that do not use battery contacts you just put it inside the charger use inductive uses inductive charging to charge up the device and and that poses an additional benefit potentially that uh you don't have these exposed metal contacts that aren't going to get dirty uh you also have one less Ingress or point for uh moisture into the hearing aid which makes the life hearing aids extremely waterproof as well mm yeah definitely I also think that there's the advantage that um most of them have this kind of magnetic aspect to them where it's really really easy to drop them in the charger and pull them back out of the charger there's really no major points of resistance but that can also cause some problems too because there are not any points of resistance what can happen sometimes in some of the Chargers where they lift yeah so um I had someone who um was trying to charge their battery a little bit later in the afternoon because one of those really long days um had stuck the charger with the inductive charging in her purse and it had gone sideways and so the hearing aids were actually just squealing and running their battery down further so she actually couldn't make it through her like it was a work meeting after hours um it was like like a dinner thing and she's like I couldn't hear a single thing that any of my colleagues were telling me the entire evening because it just got a little bit sideways inside her purse now of course this probably doesn't happen very often right but um it always happens when you don't want it to happen exactly so it's the worst possible moment that's crummy so we uh so we have receiver and Canal technology that uses either contact charging or inductive charging we've already talked about phac here a little bit um we've talked a little bit about signia because they're doing more of the contact galvanic charging and their battery life is is really really high in fact uh their new silk device that is uh completely in the Canal pretty much invisible device is now rechargeable I thought it was going to be huge when they first were were announcing the release of it and then I get a pair to review and I'm like holy cow these things are tiny size and so how do they get like 24 hours of battery life inside of that tiny little hearing aid I hope whoever figured that out makes a lot of money I wish them very well it's just magic is it really is yeah so um so we have that from them they also have non contact charging so they use inductive charging but it's for their custom in thee devices too yeah yeah and that's that's pretty common that we're seeing across a couple of different manufacturers now like ReSound and signia both have custom in the- ear hearing aids that use non- cont inductive charging with the cool um signas is not a custom kind of cradle for the device but resounds is a custom cradle for for the hearing aid which so like guarantees that your positioning of that's going to be good it has to be perfect which was difficult with the signia non-custom charging cradles you really had to get it right in the right spot and if something were to move or shift it it would stop charging one of the more pioneering companies on the rechargeable custom technology was starky but they chose to go the contct charging route uh which it was actually pretty easy because they had these like little magnetic posts that would stick up you put the hearing at on it and it would automatically like Orient itself the right way what I like about that too is that it makes removal from the case reallyy easy with the ReSound ones even though there's one way that they go in the charger I have had a lot of people struggle to get them back out because it is such a perfect fit how do you get the grip to get it back out of there that is true um but with the starky ones because it's just this itty bitty little post that sticks up and it's a magnet you can use your entire hand essentially um and there's no limitations to getting it back out of the charger and so I do like that feature from them as well because a lot of the times with the rechargeable in the ears I do utilize that a lot for those with dexterity challenges um and so having something that's really easy to remove from the from the case is uh very beneficial in that that's mention left and right doesn't matter posts can can hold either one and and that is not true for I'd say 99% of chargers you need to be in the right positioning right up until the point where you try to then put the left one in the right ear and then you come back to me saying man I've you know I I feel like these fit but now I don't feel like they're fitting and then they have them backwards is that that'll mess you up that is that is true you know and I would say though with starky is that you have these exposed gold metal contacts that are facing outward on the face plate so it sometimes you kind of look at it you're like man that's just kind of like waving to someone say hey look at me there's something in my ear come investigate which is fine I mean I guess there's nothing wrong with that but for people who like really don't want to draw attention to them um it's you have to go through I don't know how many conversations a day of like oh that's my hearing aid it has contact charging and people are probably be like oh wow like that's pretty cool you have a rechargeable you know custom in the ear hearing aid but maybe only we find that to be interesting most people probably do not care at all right yeah I feel like I run into that a lot where I think something's super cool and just like that is a very Niche thing to be excited about but I'm so glad that you're so happy thank you thank you for enjoying my joy but what I do like too about these you know these three manufacturers we've talked about is that they do actually have a rechargeable option for the completely for like the in the ear devices whereas most others do not have um an actual rechargeable device I so here's here's my issue is that it seems like a company either chooses we're going all in and do all rechargeable or a company being like nah we're going to hold off all disposable and I'm like why do we have to be all or nothing I know why can't we like have a version of a disposable because like there are pros and cons as as much as people hate to admit it there are pros and cons one thing that I've hadn't really big issue with with uh phonak from the receiver and Canal devices is that they don't have a disposable battery option of the newest lumity line and it drives me freaking crazy because I I can't tell you uh 2023 was the year that I dispensed Mo the most previous generation devices because I I needed for a patient disposable Battery Technology you talk about doing cross transmission where it chews up battery life to do that if you're going to use the rechargeable version of those cross transmitters you're getting 11 hours best case scenario with that and for people who wear their hearing aids 14 15 16 hours a day you just can't do that work not going to work I just dispensed some paradises this week um because I had to because it was a cross type of a setup with a receiver and Canal a power loss very interested in streaming very interested in connectivity and had it very unreliable um schedule day to-day with traveling what are they to do I can't put them in rechargeable product especially not that their new charger doesn't have the additional power pack that offers Wireless kind of on thee-o charging um that's not available either unless you go with the life so uh yeah it's been interesting having to go back a previous generation normally we wouldn't ever find the need to do that but we're our hands are kind of tied right now yeah here we are yeah well and that's the thing too is that uh you know we talk a lot about the rechargeable hearing aids but the Chargers also need to be upgraded for several reasons the first of which is that there are manufacturers Just by default where your charger actually stores additional charges in it just like you said so that you don't have to have it plugged into the wall all of the time like my patient you can stick it in your purse and give it a couple extra you know minutes of charge while you're driving to your next location or whatever that piece is for you whereas some companies it's like nope always has to be plugged into the wall and I just feel like the on the-go charging just has to start being a standard it has to because we see it in all of the Apple products um it's becoming kind of a like a the standard in the consumer side of things the Apple products for sure with the airpods and things you know you can always take those on the go with you I think signia made a huge push with most of their rechargeable products to include that charging capacity within their Chargers to take them on the go they've done it with the stylos they've now done it with the silks they've done it um with the PES pures all of them um so yeah it's it's it's becoming a standard in the industry and they're going to have to catch up somehow whether that be an additional add-on or or something it has to happen yeah and while we're on the topic and here's the thing I have a little bit of a bone to pick and uh this is this is going to get turned into a YouTube short so here's the thing um everyone knows I love phon I love their technology the biggest problem that I see is that their charger cases are too small to not only not have the ability to have a power like internal power bank for them but if you're doing custom ear molds which the vast majority of pH heing AIDs that I fit are with custom ear molds it just makes the performance of their hearing ISS much better and it is actually a differentiator in my opinion of their technology versus most of the other brands that are out there but you have to make the charger big enough to fit the freaking eold inside of it like if if you need me to come out there and be a a focus group of one I'll show you exactly what you need to do to make those charging cases work for your amazing technology but right now now it literally is driving me freaking crazy cuz I'm trying to fit people with these custom molds and I'm literally having to go back a generation in the charger case just so I can fit their custom ear molds inside of it and it's not rated for the newer technology but I'm like you know what we don't have a freaking option for you unless I switch you to a different brand which I'm sure phon would not enjoy me doing yeah oh you can make this a focus group of two probably a focus group of three grab Dr balderas a whole focus group of four and every other patient that I've had that has broken an ear mold trying to close that lid seriously I think like you said when you make one of the best custom ear molds on the market like we know this phac makes such a good custom ear mold and then you make a charger that doesn't fit it I'm like where did we go wrong what happened in the development process did you not try them out with any of your custom ear mold because you make a heck of an ear mold I need like these are the things that drive cardiologists and providers nuts extra nuts it just it seems like such a simple thing yeah you know and it why why is it the simple thing like because they they probably do way complex things obviously they do that are like that's unbelievable how complex that is I never would have thought of that but like literally the first thing on the first day of fitting someone with a custom ear mold that I'm trying to fit it into the charger case ease it's like H that doesn't actually fit in there and it's like playing Tetris and again you know if you have even the slightest bit of a dexterity issue like playing Tetris with your ear molds every day is not fun then the advice is then we'll leave it open but then you know what if you have like dogs and cats that like to knock things off of your nightstand while they're charging and then you get a hearing it eaten and and I'm telling you that story because it has happened where because you could they could not close the lid on their charger because it didn't fit and they didn't want to break their ear mold dog ate the hearing yeah you know this that can be incredibly dangerous like any any a person or animal eating a battery is dangerous to right so you have to make your technology and that you have to make sure that the user experience meets up with the you know the technology that you're you're creating and developing so if they release I might have to boycott if they release another charger that does not have an internal power bank and more importantly cannot fit a custom ear mold with a canal lock on it okay so I'm not talking like you know a a dome or or just a regular in the canal ear mold with no Canal lock no skeleton lock like it has to be able to accommodate everything that you could do with their hearing it and if it doesn't what the heck are we going to do yeah I don't care about the fancy flashy features if the core needs that my patients have to Simply recharge their devices are not being met don't move forward with another development on something you know tap controls great oh you know your mom's going to hate me for saying this but but we can scrap tap controller we can push it we can push it a little a little bit further to make sure that the charger works right you know like let's start with core Basics and then add the flashy mom she does not mean that okay she's I don't know what's in her coffee this morning I want does she have ear molds uh no she doesn't well then she wouldn't no her hearing aids fit fine in the charger so also pretty sure she doesn't have the Lumes either no she has Paradise Paradise she still got the I'm a bad son my previous charger so she's she's live in the high life okay all right as soon as she upgrades and as soon as she needs custom ear she will be like Cliff Cliff I'm Mom I'm fitting you with custom eals next on lumity devices and I'm going to get you a charger case ease and we'll see we'll let my mom be the focus group of that see and they should they should bring patients in who've worn them for a while been there through a couple of generations and been like do you like the the new charger or not and why well that's the thing too is that like I think that there has been a push to make the hearing aids really really small and so you know making the Chargers also small and like all of those things I think that there was a push for that but if you just like made it like a little bit bigger like a little bit wider and then even just like a little bit taller to put that little extra charge power in it so that you could take it on the Go I mean this is a very simple problem to fix well you know you were mentioning that apples ruined it because the my airpods Pro case you guys both have airpods as well the the actual case is Tiny and it has a charge and so I can't tell you how many patients come back after the first week and be like uh there's something wrong with this this uh rechargeable case I'm like well what's wrong it's like well it's not holding a charge I'm like uh yeah I know it's even bigger than the Apple airpods case that you have and that you use for streaming a different media before you got your hearing aids but it does not have an internal uh battery inside of it oh it's it's also missing the wireless charging aspect of being able to take the charger and put it on a charging pad ooh signia has again signia has branded a lot of their Chargers to look just like Apple products and I think it works um they are you can lay them flat on charging pads and there's the wireless inductive charging there um they do hold internal charges like and they're also white glossy cases that look just like airpod cases so I don't know if they're going to get in trouble for Branding their stuff that way but they definitely had it in mind of we need to make sure that these charging cases act operate and look just like every other Consumer Electronic charging case and that was really smart move in my opinion I think to that as the tech Generations start to age start to lose their hearing you know I think that that's going to be something that will hugely shift is because those Generations will have um more demands as far as what their technology can do because we've been spoiled um you know we've had every new thing and and we're you know used to getting new and latest and greatest and updated and updated and updated you know that's going to start being a huge demand in the hearing aid space totally and I sympathize with the hearing aid manufacturers they have a very niche market they're not going after hundreds of millions of people like app I mean Apple's airpod division uh is I can't even tell you how many x times larger than the entire hearing aid Market oh okay it's it's massively ridiculous how much money Apple makes on these products so they can they have R&D out to woo and they have unlimited funds to do it and hearing a manufacturers spend hundreds of millions of dollars on developing these Technologies but that's not even close to what Apple can commit to developing something that is a one-size fits-all for everybody with a mass Market of essentially everybody considering too that um within the hearing aid space you not only have to dedicate funds to the look The aesthetic the use of the devices but also people want their hearing aids to function better in spaces so you also have to put a lot of more research and development into the performance and how someone is actually going to hear with your device and that Apple doesn't have to do they just have to make the product sound good uh when you connect it to your phone or your iPad or whatever it is and have a nice battery life yeah direct audio streaming all they have to do so easy compared to hearing a technology but the other double-edged sort of that too is that we will often say you know we got to make the hearing needs you know look more modern act more modern with the wireless charging the uh portable charger cases and all this stuff we got to appeal to essentially a younger more spoiled Market to get them on board and then as soon as they do some of these things we're like you think our older patients can handle this no way they can't put them in this charger case there's no way like when I'm I'm thinking when phon came out with their Su Shield disc right oh look at this cool disc it's going to be an easier way to change wax cards and we're like what were you thinking thinking give me the mash sticks give me the sticks back you know it's like it's kind of that idea of like you know you're you're kind of screwed if you do and you're screwed if you don't right like that's right our job is to never be happy and satisfied with everything we should always be pushing forward if we if we're not acting this way they would come out with this is just the hearing aid and that's what everyone gets I don't who cares if you like it or not right yeah we we'll come out with the new one in 20 years and I hope you like it here right now and this is an interesting point because without nickel metal hydride battery techn without silver the things that we learn from that the things that we learn from Silver zinc we are not at the point where we're at right now with rechargeable battery technology it just doesn't happen and we talk about this with other hearing aid features as well is that you need to go through generations of learning of what to do what not to do and eventually you get to the point where when you learn from all the mistakes and the things that went well you can actually develop stuff that is better not to mention that we're not even talking a decade yet like when rechargeable batteries came out to now we're still two three years shy of a full decade of this technology being on the market in the hearing aid space so yeah we'll we'll give them some time I guess but I'm just sitting here yeah I'm interested like when they patiently waiting when they came out with the first Model T Ford like how much better was it 10 years after they first came out with it maybe it was a lot I don't know cuz hearing it advancement in the last 10 years has just been crazy oh and really about to be significantly more crazy as AI starts jumping on board with every single one of these manufacturers not even AI within the actual hearing aids but think of the AI That's being used to develop the new hearing a like it's it's going to move faster than we've ever seen it yeah and if it can figure out ways to even if you don't improve the battery technology which in some hearing is you're getting up what 51 hours of battery life on a single charge if you can figure out power saving ways you don't even have to improve the battery technology and you can improve the battery life of the hearing aids just by processing uh sound and and information better so I I still think that there in this world of rechargeable clearly rechargeables taking over you have certain manufacturers going 100% in on it and not even considering making disposable anything anymore if they can help it um disposable batteries still make sense for a lot of people um but you have to you know say that rechargeable is probably going to be the way of the fure um you know manxter with your fingers and whatnot and and just the convience of not having to worry if you're going to run out of batteries I think it's you know 10 years from now we're probably saying like man let's let's break out some of those old uh disposable battery hearing aids out of the museum yeah and do a little showand tell so the Young Bucks out there are like hey you guys don't know this but hearing aids used to have disposable batteries you used to have to actually take your battery out and put it back take a little sticker off of it to activate it let it charge yeah I bet you if we all look really hard on our shoes we could probably find some of those stickers are you kidding me they are all over every inch of my life why do I pull out like I'll pull out a bottle of hairspray on my cabinet at home and it's got a hearing aid sticker on it and I'm like there's no way I don't even wear hearing aids I found one on the bottom side of my husband's shoe actually um he has not been to the seriously so that's great they they end up everywhere they really do this has been a very interesting conversation I feel like we kind of uh got a little negative there on on rechargeable battery technology a little bit but it's just because we we like it and we we want to move it forward we see that it's the future uh and just hopefully some of the manufacturers are watching the podcast so they can get some good ideas it's it's the tough love that's right that's right so we wouldn't complain if we didn't care so much that is so true that is so true guys if you enjoyed this episode uh make sure that you hit that like button and if you are not yet subscribed to the Channel with notifications turned on go ahe and do that as well and we will see you next time

2024-02-24 11:24

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