Many of you already know, but to my new readers, I’d like to tell you a bit about my kid. She’s a spunky, intelligent, loveable kid who was born with a Bilateral Sensorineural hearing loss. Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is a type of hearing loss, or deafness, in which the root cause lies in the inner ear or sensory organ (cochlea and associated structures) or the vestibulocochlear nerve (cranial nerve VIII). Bilateral just means it’s in both ears. Now, this post isn’t about her specific hearing loss… It’s about how our favorite Hearing Aid brand is constantly advancing their technology to conveniently match the stage of life that my daughter is in.
My girl is now 6 years old and has been aided since she was 4 months old. At the baby stages, I’d get SHOCKED views from nurses who didn’t know that hearing aids were that small. 3 years later, she was set to replace her 1st ones and I decided to let her sport a colored one. As a mom, that took a lot for me to FINALLY be at the stage where I wasn’t worried about people looking, staring or pointing because it was now my way of creating a teaching moment for everyone else.
We are supposed to get a hearing aid upgrade every 3 years and now that she is 6, we are due to get new ones in the summer. My daughter absolutely loves music, but imagine how sad I was to see my daughter get frustrated at the feedback that her hearing aids would give off with over-ear and on-ear headphones. I could lend her some earbuds, but she’d have to put it way too loud to hear it at a “normal” level. Step in, the new Phonak Audéo Marvel!
The Phonak Audéo Marvel is the world’s first to fully support binaural direct streaming from Android™, iPhone® and billions of other devices. Marvel is a revolutionary hearing aid family from Phonak that combines the benefits of exceptional speech understanding and reduced listening effort in noise with the ability to stream all audio content seamlessly from iPhone, Android smartphone or billions of other Bluetooth enabled devices to both ears in stereo quality. Marvel hearing aids are rechargeable and empower consumers to benefit from remote real-time support via smart apps as well as a real-time voice-to-text transcription of phone calls. I’m not a huge fan of rechargeable as I’m afraid I’d forget to charge it one day but am happy that they created battery-powered versions.
AutoSense OS 3.0 was developed using artificial intelligence, to automatically learn, detect and adapt, providing the best hearing experience in any listening environment. With Marvel technology, AutoSense OS 3.0 can even classify streamed media. In a recent study, Audéo M was top-rated for the quality of streaming media against five competitors. The enhanced operating system also includes Binaural VoiceStream Technology™ into Marvel hearing aids. This highly-sophisticated four-microphone technology has been proven to significantly improve speech understanding by 60% in noisy places like restaurants while simultaneously reducing the amount of effort by 19% required to listen and understand.
Technology is amazing, isn’t it? I hope that these are either made in kid versions or that my kid can benefit from the current availability. Do you know anyone with hearing loss?
Unfortunately, you're the only person I know with hearing aids, but that sounds marvelous! I do hope that they're available for Gabby when the time comes for her replacement.