Hi guys, Cliff Olson, Doctor of Audiology and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to customize your own hearing aid programming using your smartphone or tablet. Coming up!
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 MyPhonak app for Marvel and Paradise hearing aid users. You may not realize it, but the MyPhonak 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 wanna take a few minutes to show you some customizations that you can make using the MyPhonak 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, if you could do me a huge favor and click the like button, It really helps out my channel because it gets these videos in front of a broader audience. And while you're at it, if you have not yet hit the subscribe button with notification bell, go ahead and do that as well, because that ensures that you never miss one of my new videos. That being said, I really appreciate it. 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 hear 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 features 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 features section to help you hear someone who is 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 auto- 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 MyPhonak 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 bass tones of speech very well.
So like I mentioned before, for advanced users, using the three band equalizer, I would increase bass 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 MyPhonak 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 dynamics 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-i-n 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.
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Also feel free to check out my website, drcliffaud.com.