- In this video, I'm reviewing
the Starkey Livio Edge Ai hearing aids coming up.
(upbeat music)
Hi guys, Cliff Olson,
Doctor of Audiology
and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions
in Phoenix, Arizona
and on this channel,
I cover a bunch of hearing related information
to help make you a better informed consumer.
So if you're into that,
make sure you hit that subscribe button
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Starkey Hearing technologies
has always been one of the most innovative
hearing aid manufacturers out there.
In 2014, they're one of the companies
that pioneered the made for iPhone hearing aids
and in 2018,
they were one of the first hearing aid manufacturers
to use artificial intelligence
inside of their hearing aids
with the Starkey Livio Ai.
Well they have continued to push the envelope
by developing technology
that blurs the lines even more between hearing aids
and biometric tracking devices.
The new Livio Edge Ai hearing aids
has all the same great features
that you could find in the Livio Ai's
that came before
with a few key feature additions
that make it even better than its predecessor.
As a hearing aid,
the Livio Edge Ai
comes in five different technology levels.
The most advanced here
is the i2400
followed by the i2000,
the i1600, the i1200
and the i1000.
In general, the lower in technology that you go
results in fewer features
and reduced customizability
which can limit your hearing care providers ability
to optimize the performance of these devices.
Now Starkey is added a new form factor
with the Livio Edge Ai's
but let's cover what you can get.
You can get a receiver-in-canal rechargeable hearing aid,
you can also get a battery version of this,
a disposable battery version of this,
you can get a size 13 BTE
so a size 13 battery
and a behind-the-ear device
that uses a tube and an ear mold
but the most exciting part about this
is you can now get a rechargeable custom hearing aid
so no more batteries with these costume in the ear devices,
and you still get all the same great features
that you can get with the receiver
and canal and the BTE hearing aids.
In my opinion,
the custom Livio Edge Ai
is the most significant innovation
that we have seen in the hearing aid world since 2018,
when we saw the release of technology
that could connect directly with an android device
and the other cool thing about this product
is that it can come in a variety of different colors,
so you don't have to get black,
hearing aid manufacturers
are starting to make some of their devices
go this black color route,
just because they're trying to make it look
more like a consumer electronic sensors
eventually going to be people who purchase these products,
even if they don't have hearing loss.
Now just in case you're unaware,
Starkey is really well known for their custom products
and on top of that,
you can actually have 3D ear scans taken of your ears
inside of your hearing care providers clinic
and those scans can be sent off to Starkey,
which in my opinion makes for an even better custom fit.
This is what their custom product looks like
inside of my ear.
Now this is a CIC,
so Completely In the Canal hearing aid
of course I like the color black on these,
you can get like I mentioned before any color
that you want
that matches your skin tone.
The weird thing about these though
is that you have to have the charging contacts
on the outside facing part of the faceplate here.
So if you look at that,
you can see there's kind of like gold markings on there
and that is so these devices can attach to the charger.
Now this is a pretty cool thing
because it's magnetic,
if you just kind of pop them up like that
they go right into place.
So if you have poor finger dexterity,
anything like that,
all you have to do is take it out,
just kind of drop it into place
and then it starts charging for you.
Of course like I mentioned before,
the receiver in canal also comes
in a lithium rechargeable version
and these come in a variety of different colors as well.
I tend to like to match my hair color
with these devices.
You can get a size 312 disposable battery as well
but this is what it looks like
on my ear.
Back onto the charging aspect of these hearing aids,
the other thing
that's important to note is that
you can store charges inside of the case
so you don't have to have it plugged in
and they also have a space here
that you can put a desiccant in.
I'm a huge fan of being able to dehydrate your hearing aids,
especially if you live in a humid climate
or you sweat a lot,
moisture is the enemy of electronics
and you wanna make sure
that you get all that moisture
pulled out at nighttime,
when you're charging your devices.
The charger still has a magnetic aspect to it.
Now you do have metal contacts on the bottom.
So it's not technically inductive charging
but it's very easy just to pop these hearing aids in,
they go into exactly the right spot,
so if you have again,
bad finger dexterity,
it won't really matter.
They're super easy to put in the charger
and they're super easy to get out as well.
In terms of the features for the Livio Edge Ai hearing aids,
there are a ton of them
and I can't do them all justice
inside of this review video,
so I'm going to give you a brief overview
of each one of them
and I'll probably be doing more detailed videos
down the road.
So let's go ahead and start
with the low hanging fruit
of the different features
and the first one is streaming from your smart device
and I say smart device
because no longer do you just have to have an iPhone,
you can now stream directly from your android phone
into your hearing aids as well.
As long as you have a newer android phone
that has the Android 10 operating system
and Bluetooth version five,
thanks to the new usher Bluetooth protocol,
you'll now be able to connect
your Livio Edge Ai hearing aids directly
with your Android phone,
which is something that you could not do
with the Livio AI hearing aids.
Setting up this streaming for android
is a little bit on the tricky side
but you can eventually get it to work
as long as your hearing care professional
knows what they're doing,
they should be able to set this up for you in the office.
Connecting with an iPhone is still as simple as ever.
On a side note,
if you do have difficulty connecting your devices
to your phone,
I do have a Bluetooth video guide
that I will also link in the description of this video.
Once you get your hearing aids connected
to your smart device,
you will be able to stream audio directly
into both of your hearing aids,
so this includes phone calls,
music, podcasts, YouTube videos,
whatever you can stream audio wise
that can go directly into your hearing devices.
The only limitation
that I really see what this
is that you can't truly be hands free,
you still need to use your phone as the microphone
that you're talking into,
so the person on the other end of the line
can understand you.
You also now have access
to a variety of assistive listening devices.
This includes remote microphones,
a table microphone,
a remote control,
and a TV Streamer,
which can improve your performance even more,
especially in noisy situations
and for those of you out there
who want a telecoil inside of your hearing aids,
they have that too.
The Thrive app is so full featured
that I definitely need to make an entire video review
of this app
but in general,
you can do things
like increase and decrease volume,
make frequency adjustments,
using a Four-band equalizer,
track your body score
to show how physically active you've been,
track your brain score
to show how much you have used your hearing aids
and how socially engaged you have been
and you can track your heart rate,
which I suspect is pretty high right now
due to your excitement of this review.
You can also activate different assistive listening devices
and adjust streaming volume
and hearing aid microphone volume separately.
A few other features include a Find My Hearing Aid function
that will tell you the last known location of your devices,
which can come in particularly handy,
if you misplace your hearing aids,
a hearing aid Self Check,
which I think is the coolest thing about the app
because it can tell you
if your hearing aids are mechanically functioning properly
or if you need to have your hearing care professional
repair your devices.
You also have the ability to do language translation,
hearing care anywhere
and thrive care inside of the app as well.
Let's talk about these last three app features
in a little more detail.
Language translation is obviously pretty cool
because it allows you to communicate
with someone else who does not speak the language
that you do.
So let's go ahead and test it out here real quick.
I'm gonna say something in French
and see what it translates it into English.
(In French: Parlez vous Francais?)
Do you speak French,
it says it right there,
if you can see it,
it's a pretty cool feature,
obviously there's a couple of things about it
that aren't fantastic,
there is a little bit of a delay there,
you have to basically tap this in order to say something
and if you have someone who's a really fast talker,
it becomes a problem
because you just don't have the capability
to translate that fast.
The Hearing Care Anywhere feature
is the remote programming capability
that these devices have
with your hearing care professional.
So if you are noticing some issues with your programming,
you can let your hearing care professional know,
they can make changes to your programming in the software
in their office
and then send those changes to your phone
that you can then upload into your hearing aids.
Now as far as remote programming goes,
Starkey is definitely at the bottom of the list
in comparison to other manufacturers here,
they can only do asynchronous programming changes,
meaning they can only just send you packages
to your phone for you to upload
and if you don't like those,
you have to request another one
and request another one
and another one
and it just becomes really tedious
and ridiculous in my opinion,
it would be much better if they were synchronous
like most of the other manufacturers out there
which means you actually schedule a time
with your hearing care professional,
you jump on your phone
and you actually have a live session
with your hearing care provider,
so they can be making a bunch of different changes
all at once,
making sure that you're liking them
before ultimately saving those settings
inside of your hearing aids.
If Starkey had to improve one thing
with these hearing devices,
it would absolutely be the Hearing Care Anywhere feature,
they have a lot of ground to makeup
on the other manufacturers.
Now the thrive care feature,
there is a really cool feature.
Now think about it,
you have a lot of individuals who wear hearing aids
that are in an advanced stage of life
who may still be somewhat independent
but they kind of need a caretaker maybe
for a few things
or they have their children
who are kind of monitoring the status of their health
and you can have a caretaker or family member
be tapped directly into the data of the hearing aid.
So you can track things like physical activity,
how much they're getting up
and moving around,
you can track things like social engagement,
which is really important for cognitive health
down the road
and you could also get notifications for falls.
The motion sensors
inside of the Starkey Livio Edge Ai hearing aids
can detect if someone has actually fallen
and send a notification to a caretaker
or a family member
for them to acknowledge
and to contact help if they need to.
This fall detection feature has literally saved lives
of individuals who wear Starkey Hearing aids,
which is pretty impressive
because I'm not sure you could say that
about any other feature
inside of a hearing aid at this point.
The thrive assistant is kind of like an Amazon Alexa
or a google assistant in that,
you can ask it a question
and it will give you a response in return
and you can activate this
by either double tapping your hearing devices
or going into the app to activate it,
you can then ask it a question like,
what's the weather today
and it will give you
that response inside of your devices.
So if you're someone who likes to do that
around the house with different voice activated systems
and bots to get these responses,
then you'll probably love this feature as well.
Now perhaps the most talked about new feature
of the Livio Edge Ai hearing aids
is the feature that really gives it its name,
which is edge mode.
Edge Artificial Intelligence is actually pretty cool
and if you wanna check out some other videos
that are out there on the internet
about edge artificial intelligence,
they're absolutely worth the watch
but edge artificial intelligence basically means
that you can perform artificial intelligence
directly on board the hardware,
so you don't have to be connected to a smart device
in order to have the artificial intelligence work.
So you can literally leave your smartphone at home
and you can still have artificial intelligence operate
inside of your hearing aids.
All right so the way that edge mode works
is it uses this artificial intelligence
inside of the hearing aids in order to optimize your ability
to hear in a complex listening situation,
all you have to do is tap on your device
or however your hearing care professional
chose to set this up for you,
in order to activate edge mode
and instead of me trying to explain
what this is gonna be like,
let's just go ahead
and listen to a sound sample.
(crowd cheering)
- [Man 1] He's going, he's going
- [Man 2] He's gonna take it, he's gonna take
(crowd cheering drowns out speakers)
(crowd cheering)
- [Man 1] He's going, he's going
- [Man 2] He's gonna take it, he's gonna take
- [Man 1] No, no, no
c'mon ref are you kidding me.
- Now I think it's pretty evident
based on that sound sample
that edge mode absolutely improves the ability
for you to understand speech in a noisy environment.
The only thing that I just really can't wrap my head around,
is why they wouldn't make this the default,
why they wouldn't make this happen all the time
so you don't have to activate it
and deactivate it
and reactivate it
and deactivated all the time
and I understand that there's some kind of question
of whether or not if it did it on its own,
if it would really sound natural
as it switches in and out of it all the time
but at the end of the day,
it's something that I would really like to see.
but I don't wanna sound like I'm getting greedy here,
I mean edge mode is absolutely a really cool feature,
they can definitely pull out more speech
in a complex listening situation
and if you told basically anybody
that all you have to do to hear better
in that noisy situation
is to just tap on your hearing aids,
I think they'd be okay to do that.
Now all of these features are great
but the one thing that I worry about a little bit
is these individuals
who are not necessarily tech savvy
working with these hearing aids,
yes they would be great for individuals
who have caretakers,
who have family members who take care of them
but if you yourself are not a very tech savvy individual,
these are gonna be really complicated for you
to try to figure out all these different features
and your hearing care professional
will have a lot of work cut out for them
to try to train you on all the different things
that you can do with these hearing aids
but if you are in fact a tech savvy individual,
you'll probably feel right at home with these hearing aids
and it'll probably be hard for you to ever go back
from a device that does all of these things
back to a more traditional hearing aid
that doesn't have all these cool features.
All in all the Starkey Livio Edge Ai hearing aids
are absolutely amazing pieces of technology
but just remember,
it does not matter how awesome your hearing aids are,
unless your hearing care professional
can get the most out of your devices
and that means that they follow best practices
including Real Ear Measurement
and so if you are unaware of what best practices are
or what real ear measurement is,
I highly recommend that you check out my videos
that I will also link in the description.
That's it for this video.
If you have any questions
leave them in the comment section below.
If you liked the video please share
and if you want to see other videos just like this one,
go ahead and hit that subscribe button.
Also feel free to check out my website
DrCliffAuD.com
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