I’ve recently realized that I listen to music, podcasts, phone calls on my HAs at 80-90 dB. (I get the warning notice on my iPhone frequently.) I crank things up because I can’t understand language at less than 85 dB in my worse ear. Could this do further damage to my hearing?
Your aids are adjusted to your audiogram settings or should be. I have just disabled the warnings from my phone.
From experience the iPhone gets a bit trigger happy about warnings as it assumes you’re a person with standard hearing. In the Bluetooth settings you can tell it what kind of device you’ve got connected (hearing aid) and also set your audiogram in Health. That way it has a bit more info. But as the other commenter said, I also just turn off alerts mostly as I need what I need. If your HAs are set up right and your audiologist knows what’s up, you can’t really “blast out” your hearing. Although you might find having a program for speech and streaming could help with the voice clarity and you won’t need so much volume. Good luck!
This is really helpful. Thanks!
A very good question that was discussed in another (long) thread here. The literature is not very clear on this (you would need to follow a large cohort of early HA adopters vs people who refuse HAs, for years).
Whenever I lend my HAs to my wife (who has almost normal hearing), or pass on headphones set at a volume I am comfortable with, she screams out in pain. Very likely, sustained exposure at that level would damage her hearing. But I have been wearing HAs for some five decades now, and my audiograms, though bad, have not worsened over time. And my early HAs were rather ruthless amplifiers that constantly required being wheeled up or down.
So, based on my own experience (n=1 dataset) I would say not to worry too much about using amplified hearing assistance (while still avoiding to listen to crazy loud music ofc).
Your volume is between 80-90 decibels. Although it does not exceed the critical value of 85 decibels, it is close to this range. Especially in the case of long-term use, there is still a certain risk of hearing damage. Especially considering your poor hearing, it is recommended that you try to lower the volume, shorten the use time, and consider using noise-canceling headphones to reduce further damage to your hearing. At the same time, you can use the iPhone’s health function to monitor and adjust the volume to better protect your hearing.