I’ve muddled through for quite a number of years now, but my level of hearing loss is now such that I can’t get through a working day effectively without wearing a hearing aid or two.  I’ve well and truly crossed the line where the awkwardness and issues created by bluffing/pretending to hear  a lot of the time far outweighs the irritation and discomfort of having lumps of plastic in and around my ears – day in, day out. You could say that I am now almost totally reliant on technology to function properly in work and family life – which, as I’ve mentioned before, is one of the key reasons I’ve always been interested in digital communications technologies.

The runic inscription of Harald Bluetooth

I wrote a post about a year or so ago now about my process of acceptance of hearing loss and love/hate relationship with hearing aids and, looking at my blog stats, my hearing related posts seem to gain more interest than the work related stuff I’ve written – so I hope it is proving useful to someone,  somewhere.  Please ‘speak up’ if you empathise/agree or disagree with my comments and observations.

The good thing about wearing the aids daily is that I won’t get moaned at so badly on my next visit to the audiologist. The aids have a data-logging capability that monitors exactly how long they have been worn between visits.

The effectiveness of the aids is also determined by use – as they are smart enough to learn about the environments/volumes you are exposed to regularly and make adjustments based on your hearing loss pattern. So I am pleased to report that they do indeed work better and better the more you wear them and it is well worth persisting beyond the irritation factors.

My latest hearing aids also incorporate wireless technology to communicate with each other – therefore changing the settings on one aid automatically updates the other one.

This technology is Bluetooth based and although my current aids don’t have the ability to connect with other Bluetooth enabled devices, the latest generation of aids do. Although, given the size and power requirements of the Bluetooth chip, this happens via a separate unit. The dream, of course, is the time when full Bluetooth connectivity can be incorporated into a hearing device as small as those now used widely – and at reasonable cost. The cost is an important factor when you look at the astronomical prices of top of the range hearing aids today.

Having vaguely tracked Bluetooth related developments over the last decade since my time working for a mobile network technology provider this term has taken on greater significance for me in recent months – not just relating to hearing issues.

From a software perspective, I am a big supporter of Scandinavian originated developments, as other posts on this blog particularly relating to content technologies illustrate. So it has been interesting to remind myself of Bluetooth’s mainly Scandinavian driven history, from the name itself – an ancient Nordic King who united many tribes into a single kingdom – to its underlying principles of low power, interference-free, limited range transmission.

From a work perspective, I am currently immersed in launching a new range of innovative Bluetooth products built on a first generation of developments that are illustrated here… http://www.my-io.com/

Our clever technical team have been building on this music streaming and hands-free learning to develop the Bluetooth experience ‘on the go’. My job is to spread that message faster and further than before…A few clues as to why and how we are doing this can be found here…

It’s these type of developments that help to stretch the Bluetooth experience in new directions and hopefully by 2020 we will see the arrival of ‘SmartEars V1.0’ – truly clever hearing aids that enable full onboard integration with other Bluetooth capable devices. Who knows, maybe hearing aids will become so smart, they’ll even be ‘cool’ one day 😉