Hearing aid apps for Android
Tonight I encountered an unexpected question: my dad asked me if I had any experience with hearing aid apps for phones. I had to tell him that I didn’t even know such things existed!
After a bit of thought and research it became quite obvious that such apps would be quite useful. Unfortunately, most Android app suffer from a plethora of issues that prevent them from actually being very useful for the hearing impaired 🙁
However, there are a few useful ones out there and I will provide a summary of some of the top Android apps for hearing aid assistance:
* note: it is important to realize that the type of phone or tablet you are using can have a big impact on both the sound quality and the performance / latency of the apps. All the following tests were conducted with the Samsung Galaxy S4 Android smartphone.
[To be added shortly after I process the screenshots and ratings]
I tested these apps myself and quickly realized the frustrations that many people experience when using actual hearing aids. Ideally only voices would be fully amplified and all the other sounds would stay at a somewhat normal volume, unfortunately with many of these apps EVERYTHING gets amplified… if you bump your phone, if you drop something, or even your own voice can be quite disconcerting.
With all that being said, the most useful app to my dad was actually an app for iOS instead of Android. The latency was minimal and the performance was excellent overall. It comes closest to being genuinely.