Among the drones, smart watches and 4K TVs at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, there emerged an unexpected star: a rechargeable hearing aid battery. The ZPower Rechargeable System for Hearing Aids earned its creator, ZPower LLC of Camarillo, California a CES 2016 Innovation Awards Honor for outstanding design and engineering in consumer electronics. ZPower offers the ability to turn new or existing hearing aids into rechargeable devices.

If you suspect that your hearing aid batteries don’t last as long as they used to, it’s not just your imagination. There is a logical explanation for the shrinking battery life. The move toward wireless technology in hearing devices, while beneficial to hearing aid users in most respects also has a downside: the wireless technology simply drains batteries more quickly. While batteries used to last a week or two, now they might only last a couple of days at most.

The result is not only frequent and inconvenient battery changing, but batteries dying at inopportune moments. It’s an environmental issue as well. Hearing aid users typically go through about 100 batteries per year. Since these batteries are normally not recycled, that adds up to 1.5 million hearing aid batteries going into landfills each year in the U.S.

So how does it work? A hearing care professional takes your existing hearing aids and retrofits them with two new battery doors allowing the aids to be compatible with the technology. The system also comes with silver-zinc batteries and a charger. Once a patient leaves the office with the new system, all he/she needs to do is recharge the hearing aids daily. And if a user forgets to charge their hearing aids overnight, the system will still accept a standard battery. For a demonstration of the ZPower recharging system, please contact us at the number below.

Content provided by HealthyHearing