What did you do to activate?
Toughest test is in noisy environment with multiple people talking.
Be interested in your results.
So, this is the weird part. One day about 3 weeks ago I was looking to change the noise cancellation settings, so I went into the Airpods settings menu on my iPhone, and there was the dialogie window to enable the mode. So I clicked on it and went through it.
It was literally the day after it received Health Canada approval so I'd just thought Apple had activated it here.
Oddly enough others report they are not seeing the menu option yet, and that accordingly, it has not been actually activated here. I'm not sure how I got it though. The only thing I can think of is that I had an active USA eSIM at the time and my phone then thought I was from the USA, where the hearing aid functionality is in full swing.
I never figured it out.
Did you have a hearing test? Not all hearing loss is in the same range. One benifit of real hearing aids is that they are tuned or set to your particular loss. My hearing loss is not typical, I have loss at both ends of the scale so I'm not sure if a low budget approach would get me the same results.
That said if $300 gets the job done for you that's great.
The Airpods Pro2 hearing aid functionality doesn't (and won't) turn itself on until after it's run a hearing test and it's determined you actually need it. It took about 10 minutes to complete, and was much the same as an actual audiologists hearing test. You had to be in a quiet place (it will stop if you're not, I got stopped at one point because a vehicle drove past and it detected the noise), and then it plays all sorts of tones in different frequencies at different volumes, on each ear.
I was diagnosed with "mild", which I was surprised honestly, as at times it sure seems like "moderate" to me. Just reminded again of that this evening when my wife put on the new episode of Severance and I couldn't hear jack through half of it and had to keep asking her to turn it up.
Anyhow, I find it works amazingly well. I don't leave the hearing aid function turned on all the time as I wear them at work for the noise-cancellation feature quite often (in lieu of earplugs) and I found that when I switch them into transparency mode to talk to people, when I'm in a noisy environment, the hearing aid stuff got a little overwhelming. I'm sure that anyone with hearing aids that works in noisy places probably has the same issues.
Anyhow, here's an interesting article on the whole Airpods2pro as hearing aids thing.
Apple's AirPods Pro 2 are now FDA-approved OTC hearing aids. Our hands-on testing reveals they perform well in background noise — with a bit of tweaking.
www.hearingtracker.com
TLDR: Not the same as a professional hearing aid, but at $300, freakin awesome for most people. And get a professional audiologists test vs the built in test and scan that for the setup - I will do this to see if it improves my results.
I'll bet he gets tested at work.
I wish. Hearing loss is a *huge* issue in our trade, but as with many things in our trade, our health doesn't matter to anyone to care about this sort of stuff. Just drive and shut up.
Just pulled up my average noise levels monitor on my iPhone, it tracks from the iPhone itself and my Apple Watch, and yeah, it's telling. And this is only 1 year of almost 30 now.
I'd probably be eligible for a WSIB claim to get the super fancy high dollar hearing aids now I suspect, but I need to decide if the whole WSIB juice is worth the squeeze as my companies parent company has a team in the ivory towers dedicated to WSIB claims, and not always in a good way suffice to say.
www.soundly.com
