- Hi, it's Dr. Cliff Olsen from Applied Hearing Solutions,
and in this video, I'm gonna teach you
how to clean and maintain an in-the-ear hearing aid,
coming up.
(light music)
Maintaining an in-the-ear hearing aid
generally takes a little bit more attention
than a hearing aid that sits on top of
or behind your ear.
And the reason is is because it's basically living
inside of your body.
It's a harsher environment than one that
sits on top of your ear,
because it's exposed to more body moisture,
more earwax, and things like that.
So, maintaining it properly is essential
if you wanna keep the device performing
as well as it did the day that
you were first fit with it,
and if you want that hearing aid to last
as long as possible.
So what I'm gonna do today is I'm gonna show you
several simple things that you can do at home
in order to clean your in-the-ear hearing aid.
When we're getting ready to clean a hearing aid,
we need to make sure we have a few things.
First is either an alcohol swab or a Kleenex.
I prefer alcohol swab, but some people
don't like to use them.
The next would be a bore punch, like this.
You need a cleaning tool that has a brush on it,
a wire pick, and perhaps even
a bore punch on the end of that.
And then, wax trap changers, like this.
Most hearing aid manufacturers have their own,
but that's something that you'll need
for this particular in-the-ear device
that I'm gonna be working with.
For an in-the-ear device like this,
we have a few things that we need to keep in mind.
This part right here, in tan color,
is essentially what's gonna be
showing outside of the ear,
and then everything in red
is the portion that goes inside of the ear.
So, we're gonna start off, at first,
and we're gonna give the hearing aid a wipe-down.
Any type of earwax that would be on that hearing aid,
we wanna make sure that we get
the big chunks of it off.
And, of course, if you are the type of person who
likes to make sure that the hearing aid is disinfected,
we would use an alcohol swab,
or alcohol pad, and clean it off with that.
So, now that we have all of the earwax
off of the shell of the hearing device,
we need to go in and make sure we do some
more maintenance with our cleaning brush here.
So, what we'll do with the cleaning brush is we'll take,
and we wanna brush over the openings
of the microphones that are on either side of
this push button here.
Any hearing aid that you clean will have
its own microphone slits that you will want to brush
any kind of debris or dirt off of
while you're cleaning the device.
You also wanna make sure that,
if that button is not right around those microphones,
that you give the button a good brushing as well.
Debris can build up on this button
and prevent it from being effective.
Also, here on this device, we have a volume wheel.
Same thing applies here, if grime gets inside of
where that volume wheel turns,
it won't let it turn effectively,
and you'll have issues with that,
where it needs to be replaced.
So, we're basically gonna brush off
the entire face plate on this device,
brushing off any debris that may have built up on it.
We can open the battery door on this device,
and we can take the brush and gently
clean out the inside of it,
of any debris that has gotten in there.
If you neglect this portion of it,
eventually you'll build up so much debris
inside of that opening that the battery
won't be able to make contact with the device,
and it won't power on.
So, very simple.
We have it all brushed off.
That's clean and ready to go.
Now we need to focus on the inside portion if it,
or the very tip that goes inside of the ear.
What you'll see here is a little white tip.
We need to make sure that we change that out.
That is a wax trap.
So, this little kit that we have here
is a bunch of wax trap exchangers.
And so, how this works is we have
a new end with the new wax trap,
and a removal end that we can take out the old one.
So, how this works, is we're going to take
and punch it in the center of this wax trap,
just like that.
This should hold onto it nicely.
And then we will pop it out,
we will flip over the other direction,
and we'll put in the new one, push it in,
and pull it out, and you can see that the new one
is now in there and staying put.
The majority of the time that a hearing aid is not working,
either this wax trap is clogged with earwax,
or the battery needs to be changed.
On top of that, this particular hearing aid
has a little vent hole
that you probably can't see very well here on the camera,
but you wanna make sure that you clean that out as well.
And for that, we will take this bore punch,
and we will start at the end
that is inside of the ear,
and we will snake it all the way through,
out the back end, by the face plate.
And so, any debris that would've built up in there,
we will now push out.
It's very important, if that becomes plugged,
you'll have this sensation of things
sounding like you're in a barrel,
or your own voice is sounding very boomy,
so we wanna make sure that we get that taken care of.
When you're done with that,
the hearing aid is pretty much clean at this point.
We wiped it down, either with an alcohol pad,
or with a Kleenex, we punched the bore,
or the vent hole, with our bore punch,
we changed out the wax trap,
and we brushed off the entire face plate,
including the microphone covers.
So there you have it, those are the three simple things
that you can do from the comfort of your own home
to maintain the cleanliness of your device.
One of the things that you should also be doing
is using a dehydrator kit.
As we all know, moisture is the enemy of electronics,
and with the in-the-ear hearing aid,
it's subject to more moisture damage,
so if you wanna keep the hearing device performing
for as long as possible and at the highest quality possible,
you need to be using a dehydrator kit.
Now, there are a variety of different types
of dehydrator kits, some that use silica beads
to remove moisture from the devices,
some that use a heating tray to remove moisture,
and others that force warm air through the device,
and then absorb the moisture through the silica beads.
Some of those dehydrator units work better than others,
but at the end of the day, you absolutely
should be using one of them.
On top of that, at a minimum of every six months,
you should be going in to see your audiologist
to have your hearing aid cleaned out professionally.
This will, again, maintain the clarity in the hearing aid,
and it will maintain the longevity of the hearing aid.
Unless you wanna be buying new devices every couple years,
I highly recommend that you go in
and get your hearing devices professionally cleaned,
and then maintain them in between
those appointments on your own.
That's it for today's video.
If you have any questions, please feel free
to leave them in the comment section below,
and if you enjoyed this video,
please feel free to give it a thumbs up.
(energetic music)