Hearing Aid Glasses: My First Look at Nuance Audio

Two friends got expensive behind-the-ear hearing aids in the past year. Neither of them wears them. The aids sit in a drawer somewhere, which is probably a familiar story for anyone who works in healthcare or has spent time around older adults navigating hearing loss. I have bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, progressive, with a pronounced high-frequency notch in my left ear. I have been wearing prescription glasses full time for years. When I first tried Nuance Audio hearing aid glasses at a Target about a year ago, I was impressed. Then I did some research and found a limitation: no per-ear tuning. With my left ear showing steeper high-frequency loss than my right, that called it for me. They won’t work for me.

My friends in the drawer situation changed my thinking. The best hearing aid is the one you actually wear. I spend every waking hour in glasses anyway, so a pair that doubles as hearing aids removes the friction entirely. No extra device to remember, no behind-the-ear hardware to deal with, no trouble with glasses and behind the ear wires. Nothing stuck in my ear canal all the time. So…. I ordered the Shop Square frame in shiny black with my prescription.

I have had them since Thursday (today is Sunday.) My 2021 audiogram showed pure tone averages of 23 dB right and 32 dB left, with word recognition scores of 92% and 100% respectively. So far the glasses are performing much better than expected. Sound quality in conversation is noticeably better. The asymmetry between ears has not been the problem I anticipated, though I am still in the early stages.

The glasses pair with a mobile (iPhone for me) app and offer four presets. For my loss pattern, the preset that enhances only higher frequencies is the clear winner so far. Battery life comes up in user reviews, typically around 8 hours per charge. That would be a real limitation for a full workday. The glasses solve this with a physical on/off switch on the right arm. I turn them on when I need them and off when I do not. In practice, this makes the battery concern mostly irrelevant, at least for me right now. The price landed roughly in the same range as a quality frame with prescription lenses, which is a reasonable comparison point since you are buying both at once.

Four days in, I wear them all the time and have no intention of putting them in a drawer. I will continue to review them as I put them through a range of real situations: classrooms, meetings, on the boat, crowded restaurants. Follow-up posts will cover how they perform over time, including whether the left-ear asymmetry becomes noticeable and how the battery holds up in extended use.