Do you even realize the amount of features you'll have to give up just to get a
smaller hearing aid? Chances are,
if you needed hearing aids back in the day,
it would've looked a lot like the one that I'm wearing right now,
this big beige thing that's behind my ear,
regardless whether or not you had a mild level of hearing loss or a profound
level of loss. Now to be honest,
if a big hearing aid like this one right here is what you needed to use to help
you hear better, it was probably worth it.
But it's no surprise that older generations of individuals who wore these
hearing aids didn't like the look and size of them. Fortunately,
today's modern hearing aids have come down in size,
making them significantly more comfortable to wear and less obvious to see.
However, in some cases,
going with a significantly smaller hearing aid could come with some big
drawbacks that you may not be willing to tolerate.
But before I explain exactly what these drawbacks are,
I wanna give a big shout out to ReSound for sponsoring today's video,
but more on them in a little bit. Chances are,
even if you do not care what your hearing aids look like,
if you had the option between a smaller hearing aid or larger hearing aid,
you'd probably go with the smaller one. But before you do,
you need to make sure that you understand what features you could be giving up
by going with a significantly smaller device.
And the first thing you may give up is rechargeability.
Rechargeable hearing aids are awesome.
Not only are they more convenient because you don't have to fuss with disposable
batteries,
but you also do not have your batteries running out at the worst possible
moment.
But today's modern rechargeable hearing aids require the use of lithium ion
battery technology, and these lithium ion batteries tend to be larger,
making the rechargeable battery hearing aids larger than their disposable
battery counterparts.
Disposable batteries that you use with hearing aids come in a variety of
different sizes, the smallest ones being size 10 and size 312.
Disposable batteries work based off of a chemical reaction with oxygen.
That's why they have stickers on the back of them.
As soon as you remove one of those stickers,
the oxygen gets into the battery and creates a chemical reaction with the zinc
compound.
This is why they have such a high energy capacity for such a small battery.
In fact,
the energy density is about twice as much as what you will get with lithium
batteries in the same size,
basically meaning that if you want to get all day battery life from a lithium
battery, that battery has to be bigger. So in most cases,
if you want to get a rechargeable hearing aid,
it is going to be larger than a disposable battery hearing aid.
The second feature you may have to sacrifice when going with a smaller hearing
aid is wireless connectivity,
including direct Bluetooth streaming and other wireless accessories. I cannot
even tell you how great it was when Bluetooth hearing aids first hit the market.
It's so awesome because it allows you to stream audio directly into both of your
ears from a smart device,
and you don't even have to wear any other accessory around your neck to do it.
This means you can listen to music, podcasts, audiobooks, YouTube videos,
and even stream phone calls directly into both of your ears at a sound quality
that is unmatched. But to allow this Bluetooth connectivity,
you have to have a hearing aid that is large enough to be able to house a
Bluetooth antenna and maintain a stable wireless connection with your smart
device.
Many of the smallest hearing aids that have been released since Bluetooth
hearing aids hit the market in 2014 have not had this Bluetooth capability
because they're too small. Not to mention,
if you wanna use some other wireless accessories like a remote control,
a remote microphone, or a TV streamer,
you may not be able to if you're hearing aids too small. All right, guys,
hopefully you're enjoying this video so far. We've got a lot more to cover,
but if you could do me a huge favor, click that like button,
really helps out my channel.
And if you are not yet subscribed to the channel with notifications turned on,
go ahead and do that as well. That being said, I really appreciate it.
And now let's go ahead and get back to the video.
The third thing you will likely have to give up if you have a very small hearing
aid is a telecoil. Now, I know that some people just do not care about telecoil,
but telecoil can be extremely beneficial if you go to large public venues that
have a hearing loop installed. Think of museums, concert halls, movie theaters,
and churches.
Oftentimes the acoustics inside of these large public venues is horrible.
There's a ton of reverberation,
and even if you have your hearing loss treated perfectly, you still can't hear.
A telecoil fixes that because it can tap directly into the audio system of the
public venue and stream all of the audio directly into both of your ears at an
extremely high level of quality. If you have a really small hearing aid,
the telecoil is the first thing to go because they just do not have enough room
to place it inside of the hearing aid in the proper orientation.
The good news is we are starting to see some incredibly small hearing aids start
to hit the market that do not make you sacrifice any of these features like the
OMNIA miniRIE from ReSound, today's video sponsor.
The ReSound OMNIA miniRIE is one of the smallest hearing aids currently
available on the market,
and it is still loaded with a ton of incredible features.
Not only does it provide the same amount of benefit in background noise as the
full size ReSound OMNIA receiver in the ear hearing aid,
but it is also rechargeable, Bluetooth compatible, and has access to a telecoil.
Here is a side-by-side comparison of the full size ReSound OMNIA receiver in the
ear hearing aid on the left and the new ReSound OMNIA miniRIE on the right.
You can see that ReSound was able to shrink the size of the new ReSound OMNIA
miniRIE, but doing so without sacrificing performance or features. Now,
when I wear these,
I can definitely tell that they're not as bulky as the full size ReSound
OMNIA receiver in the ear hearing aids.
This is what they look like when I'm wearing them.
They are incredibly small and they come in a variety of different colors,
so you can match it either to your skin color or to your hair color.
The ReSound OMNIA platform was specifically designed to help you understand
speech better in a background noise situation by giving you an additional four
and a half decibels of signal to noise ratio improvement above their previous
generation devices, the ReSound ONEs,
when you're using the new Front Focus feature.
Since every one decibel of signal to noise ratio improvement is roughly
equivalent to a 10% increase in speech understanding in background noise, a four
and a half decibel improvement in signal to noise ratio is massive. Now,
I know you're thinking that there was no way that ReSound was able to put a
rechargeable battery inside of these hearing aids that would last you all day,
but I'm here to tell you that they figured out a way to make that happen,
even if you tend to stream a lot throughout the day as well.
All you have to do is pop your ReSound OMNIA miniRIE hearing aids inside of
their charger at night, and in a few short hours,
they will be fully charged for you to wear them the entire next day. And yes,
somehow ReSound was able to squeeze a Bluetooth wireless antenna inside of the
ReSound OMNIA miniRIE hearing aids.
This means that you'll have no issues streaming directly from your smartphone or
tablet directly into both of your devices,
and you still get access to all of ReSound's great wireless accessories. These
accessories include the ReSound TV Streamer 2, their remote controls,
their Phone Clip, their Micro Mic, and my personal favorite, the Multi Mic.
And no, I did not forget about the Telecoil.
You still get telecoil access if you're willing to use the ReSound Multi Mic
that has a Telecoil option.
So you just bring that with you into the public venue,
you switch it into telecoil mode,
and that will pull from the hearing loop and send it wirelessly into both of
your ReSound OMNIA miniRIEs.
Thanks to advances in modern hearing aid technology,
engineers are figuring out ways to jam a ton of awesome features into devices
that are getting smaller and smaller.
I can definitely see why hearing aid adoption rates continue to climb year after
year and more and more hearing aid users absolutely love their hearing aids.
Just in the past 30 years,
we have seen a 25% increase in hearing aid satisfaction rates,
and a lot of this is due to having better hearing aid technology inside of
devices that are about half the size.
So no matter what your reason for wanting smaller hearing aids,
whether it's you have ears that are really small or you just don't want anyone
to see them,
it's nice to know that you can get some really small devices without having to
give anything up.