If you can recharge your cell phone once and it will work for several days, why can’t you do the same thing with your hearing aids? Jerry L. Yanz of Hansaton will tell anyone within earshot why. More important, he will tell you how yesterday’s inadequate rechargeable hearing aids are being replaced by new rechargeables that actually work the way you do–all day long.
Until recently, the few rechargeable hearing aids on the market had significant limitations. Often their charge lasted less than a full day, so if you depended on them from morning to night, you were out of luck.
Many first-generation rechargeable hearing aids also suffered from the problem you had with early cell phone batteries — if you recharged them before they were completely empty, they would run out of gas quicker and quicker after each charge.
As a result, most hearing aids today still require non-rechargeable, disposable batteries. The batteries last a few days or, if you’re lucky, more than a week. But no matter how energy-efficient your hearing aids are, you end up buying dozens of batteries a year at up to a dollar a piece. It’s expensive, and disposing of so many dead batteries is wasteful and bad for the environment.
But there’s good news: Hansaton solved the problems of first-generation rechargeables to many users’ satisfaction more than a year ago when it introduced its new AQ 2G hearing aids featuring the AQ Custom ITE (in-the-ear) and AQ X-Mini RIC (receiver-in-the-canal) models. Jerry Yanz, PhD and director of audiology at Hansaton Acoustics, is a long-time hearing-industry evangelist who has been banging the drum for rechargeable hearing aids as a solution whose time has finally come. He recently co-authored an article in the Hearing Review telling you everything you need to know about the new rechargeable hearing aids.
The new Hansaton hearing aids keep their charge for 20 hours or longer and fully recharge in less than eight hours. Unless you sleep with your hearing aids turned on, you get to use them during all your waking hours. If you wear contact lenses and take them out only when you go to bed and pop them back in when you wake up, now you can follow the same routine with your hearing aids.
Other manufacturers with rechargeables already on the market as well as new entrants will be racing to catch up to with new rechargeables that deliver the mainstream features that Hansaton is promoting. When they do, customers will have a choice of fully functional rechargeables to compare against traditional hearing aids requiring disposable batteries.
If you are shopping for rechargeable hearing aids, Yanz and his co-authors suggest asking questions such as: How long will the charge last? Will the power really last all day? How long do they take to to recharge? Will they be fully charged even after a short night’s sleep? How long will the rechargeable batteries last before I have to replace them? Will the manufacturer replace them for me? And how convenient and easy is the recharging system?
When multiple manufacturers along with Hansaton are able to come up with satisfactory answers to all those questions, we may see the day when rechargeable hearing aids are as familiar as our rechargeable cell phones.