As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.
Maybe it’s because I’m a newbie (less than three years) hearing aid wearer with mild-to-medium hearing loss, but this has been a subject of continued annoyance for me.
Of course, my batteries aren’t falling out of my hearing aids when I’m wearing them. No, they tend to fall out when stuffing them into pockets, bags, drying boxes, jewellery boxes, and all the other various places I put them (shhh I know it’s bad) when I take them out of my ears. Which happens, because I like my deafness when I’m alone at home, don’t need extra volume on noisy fellow travellers when I’m in public transport, and use my earbuds quite a bit for phone, music, and podcasts.
Caveat: all this might be way less true now that I’ve tasted Venture.
In any case, even if I don’t change my nasty habits, it seems that now that I’m carrying these V90s my battery-falling-out days are over. Look at the photograph closely (it’s not easy to photograph, and easy to miss):
Do you see how even when the battery compartment is fully open, there is still a tiny overlap of the casing over the battery? Maybe it makes more sense if I hold the hearing aid upside down:
The battery would like to fall out, you can see it trying to sneak away, but it’s held in by that tiny tiny overlap. If you want to change your batteries, all it takes is a tiny nudge to get the battery out. But it doesn’t fall out when you don’t want it to.
I noticed this design detail during my fitting the other week and asked Simone about it. She told me that indeed, batteries kept falling out during the fitting process…
I just love this kind of attention to detail.