This is the 8th part of my wishlist to audiologists and accousticians, hearing aid manufacturers, and the health care system. If you like to add something, share your experiences, or provide more information, I encourage you to submit a comment.
In order for hearing aids to improve a patient’s life, they have to be tuned correctly. The tuning is done in many meetings with an audiologist. The process of tuning hearing aids takes months and still after that most patients are not entirely happy with the result.
From my own experience I guess that one reason for this is that the tuning never takes place in a realistic hearing setting, but in the audiologist’s soundproof cabin. The only information he has is what I describe about that situation where I was not able to understand my friend at that party last week. In comparison, if you bring your car to a car repair shop and describe in what situations it makes problems, they for sure will try to reproduce the situation in order to examine it and fix the problem. The only thing audiologists do sometimes is taking you out on the street for a minute or two [1].
So getting your hearing aids tuned is a frustrating and time-consuming experience. As a patient you are totally dependent on your audiologist and spend a lot of your valuable time in his office without being happy about the result afterwards. It is no surprise that there are quite a number of people who started to tune their hearing aids themselves.
The problem with self-tuning is: you need special hard- and software and you need the knowledge. The knowledge is out there, although it might not be too easy, it is possible to teach yourself the required audiology.
The hardware and software on the other hand is hard to get. Officially it is only sold to audiologists and doctors [2]. There is no way to buy it on the free market like on ebay etc., because those hardware is classified as medical devices and as such not obtainable by patients.But for every market, there is a black market and when people are frustrated, they find a way. So, there are quite some people out there which tune their hearing aids, because they can do that wherever and whenever they want and not just when their audiologist is willing to give them an appointment and willing to do the tuning outside his office. So the situation is that there are people self-tuning, but because they have to do it inofficially, they don’t get any support for that. Support means software updates, manuals, maintenance material for the hardware, trainings for the software, warranty for the tuning hardware and their hearing aids etc.
What I want here is that interested and skilled patients are allowed to get a “hearing aid tuning license”. Similar to a driving license, I imagine that you take some classes and maybe have to do a test and in the end you are allowed to tune your own hearing aids. Most hearing conditions are permanent, which means as a young person, you are facing several decades of having to wear hearing aids. In that situation you might as well spend some weeks on learning how to tune your hearing aids yourself in order to be more independent.
Also, it would great, if the software would comply to common standards, meaning that it has open APIs which everyone can use to extend its functionality. The hardware should comply to open standards and be legally purchasable by patients. It would be even better if you don’t need special hardware at all but can use consumer hardware. Why do you need a special device when you hearing aids can talk bluetooth in the near future? So, why can’t I just tune my hearing aids using my smart phone or my tablet PC while I am sitting in the subway?
[1] I heart rumors, that some audiologists come home to people and adjust the hearing aids there. Of the four audiologists that I have seen so far, none of them offered that.
[2] There is one exception in the U.S: americahears.com
See also the next point on my wishlist: Legal certainty for situation related to broken hearing aids. Or the previous one: Open hardware and software standards.