I posted about using AirPods Pro as Hearing Aids back in 2023 and as of this Monday Apple announced the official Hearing Aid feature is now baked in and available in the UK. As it happens, I also had an appointment with my local audiologist today.
That was then…
Back when I first wrote about using AirPods, I used a third-party hearing test called Mimi and that fed the results into Apple Health which in turn could be used within the accessibility settings and applied as headphone accommodations both when listening on the headphones but functioned as a hearing aid via transparency mode.
Hearing Health
With recent updates Apple have added a Hearing Health section to the Airpods section of the settings app. From there there’s an option to take a hearing test and a section on Hearing Assistance.
Hearing Tests
I had quite a bit of trouble getting the hearing test to work properly, it kept saying the test didn’t work as during the test there were noises but I got my son to do a test and with his perfect hearing he was able to do it without any issue. I’ll check back on this in the future but from my experiences I would recommend using the Mimi Hearing Test app, hopefully I can get to the bottom of why the Apple test keeps failing for me… surely my hearing can’t be too bad to be tested?
Of course, if you’ve had a hearing test by an audiologist ask for a copy of the audiogram or at least take a picture of their screen. I was able to load my audiology hearing test directly into Apple Health by going to the hearing category and then choosing Add Test from the top of the screen and then Use a Previous Test Result. It quickly scanned and added the results directly.
Hearing Assistance
In the Hearing Assistance section, you can choose to Update Hearing Test Results and then choose from any of the results in Health, so I loaded my results. If the results are in the Mild Loss or above, then you can turn on the on the Hearing Aid option.
With the Hearing Aid on you can, as you can with regular hearing aids change the amplification, adjust ambient noise reduction, and use Conversation Boost. This will also enable the hearing section of the control centre so you can quickly adjust these settings. That’s it, in practice it’s not really any different to the previous post but it has been officially recognised as a hearing aid device in the UK which is great news. Also, the new features are prominent and hope that this will give more people access to assistive technology.
Update to this Update
One of the best things about the new update that I didn’t notice is the tweak to the control centre when the AirPods have the hearing aid feature enabled and in Transparency or Adaptive mode. Now when you long press on the AirPods volume slider the hearing aid volume is displayed alongside the media volume; this makes it much easier to use and adjust the hearing aid amplification on the fly.
