Visakhapatnam: The hearing impaired face social stigma and frustration. If the hearing aid they use is not suitably customised it results in whistling sounds and high pitch and the agony is doubled. All that will soon be a thing of the past. Thanks to the Bluetooth-based customised hearing aid accompanied with a mobile application.
A voluntary organisation, Suraksha, is empowering girls with hearing impairment by providing education, vocational training, audio therapy and healthcare and make the hearing aid available to people at an affordable price.
Talking to the media, the founder of the organisation Raj Gorla, who has worked in USA with jobs that requires dealing with various health challenges said, the device comes with a customised application that can be run on a smart phone or a computer and enables the screening of hearing loss in just a few minutes. The results are then used to automatically programme the hearing aid to the needs of the deaf child.
About five per cent of people in — Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram and Srikakulam — are facing some sort of hearing impairment, according to the observation of the organisation. This customised hearing aid looks like a regular Bluetooth device and would be effective in countering the stigma of wearing traditional hearing aids, he added.
“We are also planning to train the girls on how to use the software to test hearing loss among other deaf communities. The goal is to create a social enterprise service model wherein the hearing impaired girls can earn income based on testing, fitting and maintaining these hearing aids for other deaf communities,” the NRI said.
