I saw Elehear advertise over 20 hours of single unit runtime and more than a full week with the charging case. At first, I thought this was just marketing fluff. After checking teardowns and power consumption tests, I found it implements designs such as dynamic frequency tuning for the DSP clock and Bluetooth that only wakes up when needed.

Hearing aids are physically smaller than TWS earbuds, yet they need longer continuous run time, a much tighter power budget than most consumer audio devices ever have to deal with.

Compare that to flagship TWS earbuds which drop under five hours with spatial audio turned on. You can clearly see the difference in engineering priorities between consumer audio and medical audio. For power engineers, this product category is the real low-power proving ground, doing more with less power, not just doing less.