If you think about the typical hearing aid follow-up appointment with a client, the conversation can cover a lot of ground – from identifying instances where listening was more challenging to evaluating how comfortable the hearing aids feel on the ears to and everything in between. 

Hearing care professionals ask specific questions about the client’s listening experiences out in their real world, but the client can’t always remember all the details. When they provide feedback solely based on their recollection of events, a lot of insightful information can fall through the cracks. 

These gaps don’t appear because clients are intentionally holding back. It’s simply too hard to identify all the relevant details. For example, does a client know how to describe the many listening environments they spend time in? Will they have an accurate sense of how often they felt the need to adjust the volume on their hearing aids? And might they leave details out simply because they don’t realize their importance? 

We’ve introduced multiple solutions over the years to help overcome these challenges, along with others that can crop up any time from the initial fitting through to ongoing support. We refer to these solutions collectively as our “Experience Tech Tools.”  This suite of tools is easy to implement and designed to help you effectively manage time in the clinic and deliver quality care that’s supported by data-driven insights. 

All manufacturers have basic data logging in their hearing aids. We went above and beyond the basics when we introduced Log It All in 2014. 

Log It All doesn’t simply show a hearing care professional what’s happening inside the hearing aids, it captures data around the listening environments too. This allows hearing care professionals to know for certain which environments a client spends the most time in and where they might be struggling. It’s an important tool for helping identify if a client has the right hearing aids or if a different technology level might better meet their needs. 

“It’s hard for people to articulate where they spend their time or where they're having problems,” says Nicola McLaughlin, Senior Director of Marketing at Unitron. “We've done experiments at trade shows where we put hearing aids on professionals and send them off to wander. Then they come back and try to guess what their Log It All data says. Even people who have a deeper understanding of how hearing aids work have a hard time getting it right. That’s because it's difficult to map the real world to a hearing aid classification system.”

While Log It All is an exclusive solution in our suite of Experience Tech Tools, it wasn’t the first. To understand how the concept of Experience Tech Tools came to life, we need to go all the way back to 2012 and the launch of FLEX:TRIAL™. 

The FLEX tools were born out of a desire to change the approach to hearing aid fittings. Traditional hearing assessments only happen in the clinic, which isn’t representative of real-world listening environments. Deciding to purchase under those conditions isn’t ideal and can often result in unhappy clients and returned hearing aids. 

• FLEX:TRIAL offers a solution to let clients try hearing aids before they buy – with no risk or commitment. It’s designed to increase hearing aid acceptance and 88% of Unitron customers say that using FLEX:TRIAL makes it easy for clients to evaluate hearing instruments.¹
   

• FLEX:UPGRADE™ is unique technology to Unitron. It allows hearing care professionals to upgrade a client’s existing hearing aids to a higher technology to meet changing needs or lifestyles. A client simply pays the difference between the two technology levels, rather than needing to purchase new hearing aids. It’s a future-proofing solution that offers end users peace of mind. 
   

• Log It All is a powerful tool that provides insights into a client’s actual lifestyle. This helps hearing care professionals better personalize the technology of hearing aids to individual client needs.
   

These first few Experience Tech Tools sparked a school of thought around providing a more holistic view of the consumer's journey, their pain points and their true listening lifestyle. Once that mindset took hold, the innovations just kept on coming. 

There’s another interesting way to collect information on a wearer’s experience out in the world and it fits easily into a pocket. Our Remote Plus app doesn’t just add to the performance picture, it provides more granular control over hearing experiences to clients who want it. 

If you think of fitting software as the place where hearing care professionals fit and fine-tune hearing aids and access the relevant Experience Tech Tools, then the Remote Plus app offers that same experience to consumers: 

• Easy controls allow clients to adjust things like comfort, clarity and volume, and to customize program selections.
   

• Ratings is one of our Experience Tech Tools, available through the app, that lets a client capture real-time impressions of their listening experiences to share with their hearing care professional. It automatically captures the hearing aid settings and the environment a client is in when they make a rating, so they don’t have to remember it later. This helps hearing care professionals with counselling and troubleshooting. 

“If a client is in the wrong program – for example, if they’re in a music program trying to have a conversation – the sound performance is not going to be optimized,” says Stacey Gent, Senior Product Manager, Digital Ecosystem at Unitron. “But there's no way for the hearing care professional to know what happened when the client comes back in and describes the experience (unless they happen to remember they were in a music program). Since Ratings captures that information, it really gives them a lot more insight to solve those issues more efficiently.”

• Coach is another Experience Tech Tool that augments a hearing care professional’s counseling by offering additional support resources, tips and guidance directly through the app.  
  

“Hearing care professionals can’t be with their client 24 hours a day, but Coach can,” says Gent. “When a hearing care professional activates Coach, it provides helpful ongoing support. It may also help prevent follow-up phone calls or frustrations associated with clients forgetting how to do some of the many things required to operate and care for their hearing aids.”  

The Remote Plus app is designed to be accessible to all users, no matter how tech savvy they are (or aren’t). “If a client wants to use the app like a traditional remote control to adjust the volume and mute, they can absolutely do that,” says McLaughlin. “It’s not mandatory to use the more powerful functionality where you're doing things like adding optional programs, changing equalizers and looking at Log It All data.” 

“We actually have a mode specifically for people that only want the very basic functionality,” says Galen Dunning, Director, Software Solutions at Unitron. “That's something we put in based on customer and user group feedback.”

While the Remote Plus app is a powerful conduit for Experience Tech Tools that promote success once a hearing aid client is experiencing amplification out in the world, there are others that start making an impact from the first fitting.   

The First Fit workflow in Unitron TrueFit software helps make the initial fitting easy for hearing care professionals and their clients. It automatically configures the Adaptation Manager for new wearers or starts experienced wearers at full target. This flexibility provides a comfortable experience and can lead to faster adoption and long-term success for new wearers.  

Success Check is an Experience Tech Tool that helps hearing care professionals proactively prepare for upcoming appointments. It provides real-time data on Ratings, Log It All and more without the need to connect the hearing aids to the fitting software. When clients experience barriers out in the world, their hearing care professional gets email alerts, giving them the data needed to make an informed plan and save valuable time at the next appointment. They can even act on what they see and fine-tune settings from afar using another Experience Tech Tool — Remote Adjust. 

Designing an end-to-end ecosystem that benefits both hearing care professionals and their clients was an intentional choice. 

“You can see an evolution where we kept challenging ourselves to make the ecosystem a little more powerful with each new feature,” says Dunning. “We don’t want it to feel like a bunch of disconnected technologies. We’re constantly considering how to elegantly add new pieces to this larger puzzle of solving client needs and struggles.” 

One thing that has become clear over all the 10+ years of building our ecosystem that includes the Experience Tech Tools is that the small things really matter to our customers and their clients. Many people make a point of telling us how grateful they are when we make their lives even a little bit easier. 

“As part of a Unitron TrueFit update, we added some info indicators in the interface. They are just little descriptions of what the different features do,” says Gent. “It felt like a small thing relative to the other changes we’ve made. The amount of feedback we received about how meaningful it was to have that easy point of reference was amazing.”  

“Many of the ‘little things’ are not little after all—they can make a huge difference,” says McLaughlin. “If we ever go down the wrong path, we course correct very quickly and learn from those experiences. But when our features and solutions do make a positive impact, it’s super satisfying.” 

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For 60 years we’ve been solving meaningful challenges for the people who wear hearing aids and the hearing care professionals who help them along their hearing journey. This article is one in a series featuring insights from our internal experts who spend their days making sure you and your clients always love the experience. Easy to wear, easy to hear and easy for you – that’s the Unitron way.