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I’ve been asked how I charge the battery.
The Acclaim® has a battery that is implanted in your chest, below the collarbone. Refer to this Envoy Medical page for details and illustration.
The Acclaim also comes with a battery charging pack. This charging pack charges the internal Acclaim battery. Think of it like one of those portable battery packs you can buy to charge your cell phone or electronics on-the-go. You keep that portable pack charged and it in turn charges your stuff.
That’s how this works with the Acclaim:
Just put on the harness, attach the circular coil, position it over the area of your chest where the battery is implanted and then go do stuff.
Charging from near zero (Acclaim shuts off automatically if the battery drops to around 3%) to full takes about 3 hours.
I charge while doing any number of things: working on the computer, reading a book, watching TV, listening to music, listening to my son Mickey explain something to me. (Acclaim takes about 3 hours to charge. Mickey’s explanations take about 3 hours, a bottle of vodka takes about 3 hours to drink–it all fits together beautifully. I’m kidding, I’m not a big drinker. Mickey only takes 2.5 hours to explain something…)
The point is, the Acclaim allows me to just live and do things. Honestly, it and my hearing loss aren’t in my day-to-day thought processes. I just go do stuff. Charging is the only area where I have to think about the Acclaim in my day-to-day. Isn’t that the ultimate solution–where you forget about it and your hearing loss?
There are two photos on Envoy’s site here: https://www.envoymedical.com/acclaim-pivotal (scroll down) and here are two pics of my charger, as well as what the incision area for the battery implant looks like on my chest. The scar has healed really nicely. Apologies for a shirtless photo. I could have done a “George Costanza” and posed on a fainting couch or something.
The harness holds the charging coil in place over the implanted battery. As I mentioned, it’s from near zero to full-charge in about 3 hours. I get 3 to 5 days per charge depending on whether I leave it on around the clock like I usually do. You can watch TV, read, drive, or just live your life while it’s charging. The implant keeps working the entire time.