My life has changed for the better since I started wearing an Apple watch.
If you have hearing loss, as I do, there is no downside and a multitude of upsides to using a smart watch.
It tells me the time. I went for years without wearing a watch; who needs to know the time within a nanosecond? “Excuse me, do you have the time?” worked well enough for me. But now I love the instant time-telling, partly because I’m getting older and if someone told me the time five minutes ago, I might have forgotten by now.
Its fitness tracker keeps me motivated to stay fit. At least fitter than I was before I started wearing it. And when physical and mental health improves, we can better handle the stresses of our hearing loss.
It offers an amazing variety of apps and the meditation app is one of my favorites. Because of my chronic, pervasive and loud tinnitus, meditation works on the brain’s neuroplasticity and, in my case, it can help lower my hyperacusis. The app (I use Insight Timer) is proactive – it sends me messages: how about 5 blissy minutes of breathing? I appreciate its thoughtfulness.
When activated, the dB-noise monitor tells me the loudness of my environment. If noise becomes dangerously loud, the monitor sends me an unsolicited warning. A loud noise was detected, 100dB, although once it was just me slamming the microwave door.
But the timer function has been the most useful – and most used – app on my watch. Because I don’t hear the alerting and warning sounds that tell ‘hearing people’ when their pasta has probably reached the al dente stage, or that whatever is in the oven is now done, I’m able to set my watch timer for the required amount of time. When time’s up, my wrist vibrates and off I trot to the kitchen.
But the crucial part is this: I (me, myself) have to set the watch timer.
Recently while visiting our son in California, I put eggs on to boil in our motorhome, which we park about 300 feet from the house. I ran up to the house for a moment, got chatting, and returned to find the motorhome filled with smoke. It could have been an environmental and financial disaster, and I’m grateful to the universe that it wasn’t. The motorhome is fine. The eggs not so good.
In this case, in leaving not only the room but the building, I should have set the watch to dingy-vibrate for the normal time it would take eggs to come to a rolling boil. And you can bet your sweet bippy that’s what I’m doing from now on.
My smart watch is my favorite all-round personal accessory. It makes me feel safe. It syncs with my phone and computer. It keeps me up to date with breaking news (which seems to be every five minutes, these days). It promotes better health and most importantly, and if properly used, it alerts me to events that I can’t hear.
