Being a Veteran I have no choice in what hearing aids I use but they have provided ones that seem to pretty good. I have 50% hearing loos in both ears. But now to the problem I am trying to solve. While I do have an iPhone I use it only for interfacing with my many medical devices. Mostly this is because I live in a rural area and down get signal for the iPhone to use it as a phone and I have not been able to hear any calls clearly on it when I do get signal. Also I could use the iPhone to talk to people even though I don’t get signal but having it use WiFi to connect to the internet but there comes another downside. Being in a rural area I only get limited data with my internet which this method uses up quickly. This also makes it so that I can’t use a captioning service in order to have a chance of understanding what is being said. This require internet which is limited by both my data limits and is very unreliable at best. So I use a cordless phone for voice calls though a Home Phone device that does get a signal from a cell tower.
So now to the problem. I do have a newer set of vtech cordless phones that are actually the loudest phone I have ever had, but still find myself having to ask people to repeat what they say constantly when talking with that phone. I’m pretty sure that if I could get my Phonak HA to connect with a cordless phone I could solve this problem to an extent at least.
The other problem I have is the answering device that is part of the phone I can’t hear at all. I might be able to pick out one of maybe 20 words that are said in a message and forget about understanding any of the numbers they leave for me to call them back on.
So now I am trying to solve these problems as best I can. I do actually love my Phonak P90 HA and the app I have for them on my iPhone. Before I got them I had to rely on on watching their lips and where I was in the making an order while in restaurants because of all the noise from dishes being rattled and other people talking to figure out what to say to the server. Now I open their app, push a button, and all of that noise and talk is filtered out so I can understand the server.
So I need an answering machine and phone that will work with my HA so that I can understand things. I did go to the Phonak web and they listed a phone that works, but it had no answering device and only 1 phone so that I can’t have multiple phones in my house.
Yes I know I could pair my current cordless phone to my iPhone and in turn to my HA. But if I do that when I try t o make a call with that setup from my cordless phone the iPhone will then try to make the call through WiFi and my internet instead of using the Home Phone cell tower connection. I went through several GB of data and it was only then my ISP informed me that I had used all of my data for the month that I realized that problem. And NO I can’t just turn the WiFi off on the iPhone because that is how it connects to some of my medical devices.
I hope you people can understand what I have told you here and maybe someone can come up with any suggestions.