Chennai: The hearing impaired have always had to undergo painful invasive surgeries to insert the hearing aid.
In a move to eliminate this pain two engineering students have invented a hearing aid cap. Abhinav Gandhi and Aditya Sripada who study at SRM College presented their invention at the recently concluded Shastra fest in IIT and were greatly appreciated for their work.
According to the students, they were driven to invent the device after finding out how painful the procedure was for the hearing impaired, “First a hole has to be drilled into the ear and then the device is fitted inside.
The whole process takes about 2-3 months and the patients also have to take the risk of the meningitis and also failure of the whole procedure. We aimed to avoid this with our new invention,” said Gandhi.
Using basic principles, the duo finally figured out how to go about the new device, “It was essential for the brain to receive a signal to understand the sound, therefore we decided if the electronic sound vibrating device was pressed into the skull, then the signal would directly reach the brain,” they explained.
The budding engineers said that their device could also enable the visually impaired to also make use of Google map facilities n their phone.
“The visually impaired have extremely sharp hearing, however they are unable to use Google maps because of the voice of the map instructor would drown out the noise of the traffic. Therefore with this cap, they will be able to hear the sound of the traffic through the cap hearing aid and the voice of the instructor too” said the students.
The students said they chose the cap as the base of their design because the differently challenged do not want to wear anything that would make them standout in the group.
“A cap is something that every one uses so this way more people could make use of the device, said Gandhi.
