The Phonak Fit - Putting the Active Back in Listening

Say goodbye to your fitbit, apple watch, or other fitness trackers and hello to the Phonak Audeo Fit! If you want to track your health journey but don’t want the hassle of a watch around your wrist, the Phonak Audeo Fit is the hearing aid for you!

The Audeo Fit is a sleek hearing aid with multiple colour options that discreetly sits behind your ear. This unique hearing aid once again proves that Phonak thrives on innovation. This is the only hearing aid on the market that will support your health journey. The Audeo Fit features a heart rate sensor and can track your heart rate, steps, and activity levels, promoting healthy habits and a greater sense of well-being. Your health information can easily be accessed through the myPhonak app and you can even set yourself fitness goals!

So why would you want to monitor your heart rate?

Monitoring your heart rate during exercise, indicates how intense your workout is. Maintaining a specific heart rate for a prolonged period of time can help you burn more calories and fat, and also help you increase your cardiovascular health. Your heart rate can also warn you of dangers when you are over exerting yourself.

Monitoring your heart rate during exercise, lets you stay in the perfect intensity level to burn the most fat. If your heart rate becomes too fast, the body has to burn carbohydrates and stops burning your fat! To work out the best heart rate zone for you, first subtract your age from 220. For example, if you are 45, your maximum heart rate should be 175 beats per minute. At 50-60% of your maximum heart rate, you’re using 85% fat to burn calories. At 60-70% of your maximum heart rate, that drops to 65% fat being used. And at 70-80%, you’re only using 45% fat to burn calories. This means for our 45 year old, the best heart rate during exercise would be 87 to 105 beats per minute.

This is why the Phonak Audeo Fit is so convenient for your workouts. All of this information will be monitored for you and you don’t have to worry about remembering to put on a fancy heart rate monitor or watch. So if weight loss is your goal or you’re ready to get back into exercising but are concerned about straining your heart. This aid can help you!

The Paradise Platform

The Audeo Fit runs on the most sophisticated platform for crisp, natural sound and brilliant speech understanding, the paradise platform! The Audeo Fit has two versions currently available: The premium version and the advanced version. So what does this mean for the hearing aid function?

The paradise platform uses a brand new artificial intelligence automatic system to recognise and adapt to different listening situations. This means that when you go from a quiet room to sitting in a car, or chatting in a noisy restaurant, your hearing aid can automatically adjust the sounds around you to give you the best speech understanding possible. Some of the listening situations these hearing aids can recognise include:

Aside from the heart rate monitor, both levels in technology also promise:

• Real Ear Sound: this simulates the performance characteristics of the ear shape to restore localisation and the ability to experience natural sound perception.

• Motion Sensor Hearing: This feature allows the hearing aid to determine when you are moving and having a conversation, and automatically steers the hearing aid microphones for brilliant speech understanding and a more preferred listening experience while walking.

• Wind-block: As this aid is designed for people who enjoy fitness, a wind block has been included to make listening more comfortable on your daily jogs!

• Whistle-block: If you ever had a hearing aid that constantly whistles, you know how annoying that can be! This is why this hearing aid has been designed to prevent this from happening!

• Tinnitus Balance: If you have issues with tinnitus, the audiologist can unlock this feature, allowing the hearing aid to soothe and assist with your tinnitus, while still supporting your hearing.

• Tap Control: Access Siri/Google Assistant, pause/resume streaming, & accept/end phone calls with a simple tap on your hearing aid.

• Bluetooth Technology: This feature allows you to stream phone calls, podcasts, music and more directly to your hearing aids from your phone. The Audeo Fit is compatible with both Android and Apple devices.

• Remote Tele-Audiology: Your audiologist can access your hearing aids and make adjustments to the sound for you remotely if you don’t want to travel back to the clinic.

• Access to four more additional hearing aid programs: Aside from the programs listed in the table above, your audiologist can also enable up to four extra programs for you on these hearing aids. For your advanced version, this means you can pick some of the programs listed in the premium version. Aside from those previously listed, other options include, speech in 360 degrees, acoustic phone, or a custom program tailored to your specific needs by the audiologist.

For the premium version, you can also access dynamic noise cancellation which lets the hearing aid remove noise even in between words to increase the signal to noise ratio, for better speech understanding! This brings us to the other feature included in the premium version, speech enhancer. The speech enhancer, is designed to make softer speech cues more audible, without increasing the overall volume of the hearing aid, or changing the overall soundscape. So if you struggle hearing people with masks, this is the ideal solution for you.

These hearing aids also come with multiple other features but if we list them all this post may become too long! So let's delve into what people have to say about these fantastic aids. The web was searched extensively for reliable reviews by other hearing aid wearers. It was found that the average rating for these aids was 4 out of 5 stars. The majority of hearing aid wearers were pleased with how much these aids helped with phone calls, the physical comfort of the aids, the overall hearing improvement, and how clear and natural the sound was. One star was removed from a perfect rating as some patients were dissatisfied that the hearing aid would automatically adjust the sound depending on the setting, as they wanted more control over their device. So if you enjoy your hearing aid being able to adjust things without you having to push any buttons, then you will be a part of the 80% of people satisfied with this device.

Audiologists state that these particular aids improve speech understanding significantly more than other Phonak hearing aids because the noise reduction has been improved on the Paradise platform. Many also commented on the overall patient satisfaction and mentioned that these aids provide some of the most natural sound available on the market.

Overall, if an excellent listening experience and fitness are your passions, then trying out the Phonak Audeo Fit should be your next step! Here at Hearing SA we offer free trials of any device so that you can make an informed decision about which hearing aid works best for you. Our price list is available on our website, to view the cost of these aids in either technology level. If you would like to book an appointment or simply have a friendly chat about the benefits of this aid please call us on 0403 690 980 or on 08 8272 6621.