From talking fridges to iPhones, our experts are here to help make the world a little less complicated.
Ashby-Scabis told CNET in June that she owns a pair of AirPods, has heard their hearing enhancements discussed in conferences and has toyed with some of the features.
She's been impressed, including with the Live Listen feature that lets you use your iPhone or iPad as a directional microphone to pick up specific sounds in noisy environments, giving a more intentional element to hearing. (This works with AirPods but also some Beats devices.) Conversation Boost for AirPod Pro is another feature that helps you focus on the person in front of you who's talking. Trouble hearing people talking in noisy environments is often one of the first signs of mild or moderate hearing loss.
"That's something that we encourage all the time with more traditional prescription hearing aids," Ashby-Scabis said. "We still try to get people to use accessories that can zoom in on certain people in some settings."
You'll need a pair of AirPod Pro 2 to get the most out of Apple's hearing features -- both existing and pending for this fall. To get the most out of Apple's hearing assistance features on your AirPods, you'll need to go into Transparency Mode, which somewhat resembles a hearing aid because it fine-tunes the sounds of your environment to your specific hearing.
You can toggle with Transparency Mode by going to Settings in your iPhone or iPad. Then select Accessibility > Audio & Visual then select Headphone Accommodations. From there, you can select Custom Audio Setup and even upload results from an audiogram or hearing test so it's most personalized. Once Transparency Mode is on, you can further adjust it under Headphone Accommodations and turn on Conversation Boost or play with the Amplification setting.
Even making small changes like toying with speech brightness or making things sound crisper can help some people who may have begun to lose a bit of hearing.
"I think that brightness boost can really make a difference for those folks who are starting to lose some high frequency," Ashby-Scabis said. "And it helps them pull in those consonants and gives them a little more clarity to speech."
Read more: 10 Tips to Lower Your Risk of Hearing Loss
From talking fridges to iPhones, our experts are here to help make the world a little less complicated.
Very limited research so far suggests that AirPods Pro do just as well as a basic hearing aid, even if they're still beat out by more premium models. There's a wide range of hearing aids, ranging from personal and unregulated sound amplification products, which are meant for situations where you'd like louder sounds, to OTC hearing aids for mild or moderate hearing loss and prescription-grade hearing aids.
AirPods Pro 2 may be a much more affordable option for many who could benefit from a hearing aid. For example, AirPods Pro 2 are currently hovering a bit above $200. And while it's a far cry from the average $4,000+ price tag of prescription hearing aids, a good pair of OTCs will still run you at least several hundred dollars.
Like with other prescription-free hearing devices, AirPods Pro 2 won't be for everyone with hearing loss. Over-the-counter devices aren't meant for children with hearing loss or adults with severe forms of it. People experiencing pain or other ear symptoms along with hearing loss should see a doctor or audiologist before buying any hearing aid.
Getting hearing health to be taken as seriously as other aspects of health has been a feat, according to Ashby-Scabis. But she says the public and medical community is catching on to all the ways hearing can affect our health, from cognitive effects and physical conditions that may also be connected to hearing ability.
"That doesn't mean that the hearing loss is causing the health conditions, but untreated hearing loss does tend to lead to depression, social isolation," Ashby-Scabis said. "You start to see people withdraw, they become more sedentary -- it can have such an impact on a person's general health."
Source: cnet.com