Hearing aid disruption, 2005 Super V8

[Davidqhog]

Morning All,

On two occasions recently I've had chaps in the passenger seat with hearing aids. Both had terrible interference in their hearing aids and had to take them out! They were fine outside the car but even I could hear their aids clicking & squawking from the driver's seat.

Anybody know what the cause is lilkely to be and what can be done about it? Apart from not giving lifts to people with hearing aids!

Regards,

DQ

[PolMike]

Hi, The same happens in my x350. It is caused by two or three sensors that detect whether a person is sitting in the front passenger seat. When it detects no-one in the seat, or if someone in the seat is leaning too far froward, it deactivates the front passenger airbags. When passenger is seated normally the sensors activate the airbags. When de-activated a small orange coloured light comes on in the corner of the facia in front of the passenger seat - when activated the light goes goes out.

[Davidqhog]

Hi, The same happens in my x350. It is caused by two or three sensors that detect whether a person is sitting in the front passenger seat. When it detects no-one in the seat, or if someone in the seat is leaning too far froward, it deactivates the front passenger airbags. When passenger is seated normally the sensors activate the airbags. When de-activated a small orange coloured light comes on in the corner of the facia in front of the passenger seat - when activated the light goes goes out.

How very annoying! So not much can be done about it by the sound of it and users of hearing aids will just have to tavel in the back or not at all!

[BrianG]

This topic has arisen before but unfortunately the problem is almost impossible to rectify on the spot except by the wearer sitting in the rear seats. As correctly stated by PolMike it is caused by the ultrasonic position sensors for the passenger air bag disabling system. It would be interesting to know if turning this facility off somehow would cause problems with other safety systems in the car.

My wife has tried two different digital hearing aids without improvement, but interestingly her older analogue hearing aids were much better in this respect with only some minor interference. The reason it interferes with so many modern hearing aids is the 40kHz frequency used by the cars' ultrasonic transducers; this is generally not capable of being filtered out adequately by modern digital hearing aids even after tuning adjustment by specialists. It's basically a design error by the manufacturers in trying to make the hearing bandwidth too wide, with the consequent filter response not being sharp enough(see Nyquist sampling frequency, for those that want a technical reason).

[ragnarcarstam]

I have had the same problem.
Changed from GN Resound to Phonak, 2 years ago because of this

Very irritating, but bearable with the phonak.
I sometimes take out my right hearing aid, it helps with only the left in.

Bestregards
Ragnar

2008 XJR, (2004 XJR)