- Hi guys, Cliff Olson, Doctor of Audiology
and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions
in Phoenix, Arizona.
And in this video, I'm gonna show you
how to customize your own hearing aid programming
using your smartphone or tablet.
Coming up.
(chill music)
Professionally programmed hearing aids
have so many features and customizations
that your hearing care professional can use
to program your hearing aids,
that it would make your head spin.
They have access to everything
from frequency band adjustments, to gain compression,
to frequency compression,
to directionality, to noise reduction,
and the list goes on.
In most cases,
if you have a high enough hearing aid technology level,
then your hearing care professional
should be able to make precise adjustments to those devices,
to make them perform exactly the way that you want them to.
However, there is always the possibility
that you may find yourself in a situation
where you want your hearing aids to perform
in a different way than your hearing care professional
has set them up to perform.
You see, human perception differs between individuals.
So even though your hearing aids may be set up
in a perfect way for a certain environment
for a certain individual,
you may actually want settings
that are slightly different from that.
Unless your hearing care professional is your best friend
that goes everywhere that you go
and who can program your hearing aids
no matter what situation you're in,
then you are going to have to find a way
to do some self customizations to your own programming.
That's why Phonak, today's video sponsor,
gives you access to advanced feature adjustments
through the My Phonak app
for Marvel and Paradise hearing aid users.
You may not realize it,
but the My Phonak app allows you to do a lot more
than just change your programs and volume levels.
There is an entire section dedicated to allowing you
to make your own customizations to your programming,
and then allowing you to save those customizations
for later use.
I want to take a few minutes to show you some customizations
that you can make using the My Phonak app
to help you hear better
in two difficult listening situations.
The first one is being able
to hear someone who's a soft talker
and the second one is being able to hear
in a noisy environment, like a restaurant.
But before I get into the customizations
that you can make for these difficult listening situations,
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Now let's get into those customizations.
Let's take a look at the different adjustment options inside
of the advanced feature section
that you can access in the bottom right corner menu
of the remote control screen.
At the top,
you have two quick key options called clarity and comfort.
These are preset options that do exactly what they suggest.
Comfort makes things softer
and more comfortable to listen to
and clarity makes things sharper and easier to understand.
When all else fails, these quick keys
can be an easy way to help you here even better
if you're in a pinch.
Below these quick keys,
you have a three band frequency equalizer
that allows you to adjust bass, mids and treble tones.
This is a feature that is best reserved
for an advanced user who understands the differences
between different frequencies that they want to adjust.
Next, you have overall volume,
which is pretty self-explanatory,
followed by noise reduction,
which lets you reduce the amount of amplification
given to steady state noise
in your environment
without dramatically lowering amplification
given to speech information.
Below that you have a feature called speech focus,
which allows you to adjust
which direction your hearing aids
primarily pick up sound from.
So you can focus on sounds most important to you.
And last but not least,
the dynamic section allows you
to adjust compression settings
by either reducing amplification for loud sounds
or increasing amplification for soft sounds.
One piece of advice that I always give all of my patients
is to only adjust one of these parameters at any given time.
Take it to the extreme one direction
and take it to the extreme the other direction
and identify if making an adjustment
to that particular parameter is actually giving you benefit.
If you just go into this advanced feature section
and just start moving everything around,
expecting to hear better,
you're probably not going to ever find settings
that work better for you.
Keeping that in mind,
let's take a look at some of the customizations
that you could do inside
of the My Phonak app advanced feature section
to help you hear someone who has a soft talker better.
Hearing soft-spoken individuals
is something that nearly everyone
with hearing loss struggles with,
especially since everyone started wearing face masks
at the beginning of the pandemic.
The first thing that I would recommend you do
is use the clarity quick key.
As you can see,
this automatically adjusts multiple parameters
inside of the app that Phonak researchers have identified
to increase the audibility and clarity of a soft talker.
Sometimes this is all you need to do
and you're good to go.
However, to get even more benefit
using the advanced features section
of the My Phonak app, I would recommend
that you change the following three parameters,
which include the three band equalizer,
the overall volume and dynamic compression settings.
One thing that makes a soft talker a soft talker
is that they do not project the low frequency base tones
of speech very well.
So like I mentioned before, for advanced users,
using the three band equalizer,
I would increase base to max to see if it helps.
If it does, leave it there.
If not, reduce it back to the starting point
and move on to overall volume.
Take the same approach with the overall volume setting
and increase the volume higher.
If this helps, leave it at this higher level.
If not, return it back to the starting point
and move on to the dynamic setting.
The compression settings inside of the dynamic section
are what will likely make a dramatic impact
on soft level speech.
By moving the slider towards increase soft,
your hearing aids will only amplify soft level speech
without increasing the volume
for all other sounds around you.
And since you're only trying to hear the soft speech
of the person you're talking to,
this should help significantly.
After you find the right combination of settings
using this approach,
I would recommend that you save these settings
as a custom program.
That way you can access them again in the future.
And I do want to stress this,
you have to save these settings
after you are done making them,
otherwise your hearing aids will not maintain them.
So those are the customizations
that you would likely want to make
if you wanted to hear a soft talker better.
But what happens if you find yourself
in a really noisy environment, like a restaurant,
and you still want to be able to follow along
with the conversation?
Well, taking the same approach,
I would recommend that you take a look
at the following four feature adjustment settings
inside of the My Phonak app,
starting with the three band equalizer,
noise reduction, speech focus,
and dynamic compression settings.
When in background noise,
you generally do not want to increase bass tones
because background noise is usually low frequency in nature.
So I would recommend
that you increase the high-frequency treble tones
to help separate speech from the background noise.
After you determine whether or not this helps,
next, I would recommend adjusting noise reduction.
This feature takes the steady state noise inside
of the restaurant
and reduces the amount of amplification given to that noise.
After you determine if that feature helps,
I would move on to speech focus,
which controls the direction
that you want to pick up sound from.
In a restaurant,
if you do not want to hear the people behind you,
you can narrow up the pickup range of sound
to directly in front of you.
Just keep in mind, if you put this at the strongest setting,
you are going to want to make sure
that you are facing the person that you want to hear.
Finally, I would make an adjustment inside
of the dynamic section to decrease loud sounds.
This will adjust the compression settings
to give less amplification to loud restaurant noise.
Once you find the combination of settings
that you prefer in that particular situation,
again, you have to make sure
that you save this as a custom program
so your hearing aids lock in those settings.
The other nice thing about saving these as custom programs
is that you can access them again in the future
if you find yourself in a similar listening situation.
Sometimes a savvy hearing care professional
can just take a look at the settings adjustments
that you've made inside of these custom programs
and modify your AutoSense OS 4.0 programs
to make it to where your hearing aids automatically switch
into the settings that you prefer in those situations.
If for some reason you just cannot find a combination
of settings inside of the My Phonak app
to help you hear
in these difficult listening situations significantly better
then I would highly recommend
you consider an assistive listening device
like a Phonak Roger ON or Phonak Roger ON and microphone
because I have not yet found a single situation
that these microphones don't help considerably in.
When it comes to optimal hearing aid programming,
what works really well for someone else
might not necessarily work for you,
which is why it's so beneficial
to have you be able to modify your own program settings.
So if you're looking to get another 10,
maybe even 20% of benefit out of your hearing aids,
make sure that you go with the hearing aid
that has access to an app
to allow you to make your own customizations,
to optimize your performance.
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 it.
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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