MFI hearing aids (a solution)

By Deborah Armstrong, 23 October, 2021

Forum
Apple Hardware and Compatible Accessories

I wanted to post this report for other MFI hearing aid users.

I have Costco KS8 hearing aids and previously a first generation iPHONE SE.

I had intermittent problems with the setup. Both the phone and the aids worked great, but not always together. The aids cut in and out. The phone would switch between the speaker and the aids. If I was streaming meadia or on a call it was especially unreliable. But, if I was doing something strictly local, they worked together fine.

I asked other blind people but nobody reported having this issue; I was sure something was broken on my end. I talked to Costco but they don't know what Vo is, so they were no help.

In desperation, I wrote to Scott Davert at the Helen Keller national center and he suggested that bluetooth and wi-fi possibly cellular connectivity shared the same chip and it could not keep up with the processing demands, especially since I was using VO.

My phone was stolen and I bought a new SE the 2020 generation. All these problems disappeared.

Last Sunday I was at an Amtrak station with very screeching-loud freight trains passing through about fifteen feet away. I was sitting in a plexiglass shelter which amplified their sound to deafening. Even so, I could clearly hear VO reading me the Uber app and I could clearly hear the Uber driver through the KS8 aids when he called me. With the loud trains I could hear absolutely nothing else but the connection between the phone and the aids was rock solid.

So if you have an older iDEVICE that doesn't seem to work well with your aids, it might just be the effect of its slower processor. We use extra processor cycles with VO, and on top of that connecting to the internet and bluetooth, (MFI is just a form of bluetooth) seems to tax the earlier generations of iDEVICES!

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Comments

By Bruce Harrell on Monday, October 25, 2021 - 12:37

Hi. Thank you for your post. You have cleared up an issue that has been an inconvenience for me for around 4 or so years, ever since I bought my first mfi hearing aids. Next year I hope to upgrade to the iPone 14 from my iPhone 10s. Even though my iPhone has a relatively good chip, I still have the same issue you described, although not quite as severe.

Thanks again! smile

Bruce
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By Deborah Armstrong on Monday, September 25, 2023 - 12:37

I've had my SE 2020 now for over two years, and the connection between the Costco aids and the phone is still very solid, even when I'm streaming media. I do have to be about twenty feet or less away from the phone, but the problems with my old iPhone SE never re-occurred.
When my mom passed away I used her iPHONE 13 for a while to close out her accounts: cable TB, Apple of course and many photo sharing services. I connected my MFI hearing aids without trouble. Mom also had several iPADS, including an old iPAD 2 and my aids were a little flaky with the oldest iPAD but not her newer ones. Her devices have all been given away to other family memvers after I finished fully deleting her data and restoring them to factory settings, but I wanted to report on the effectiveness of my MFI aids with these other devices.