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Can You Hear Me?
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Mr. Tomson Devis*
Email: tomsondevis@gmail.com
Ilive in a small village in the district of Kottayam in central Kerala. The livelihood of most of the people in my area is agriculture.
Due to this relatively stress-free and healthy profession, most of them enjoy good health and live longer. This also makes the village more green and prosperous than other places in the state. Since I completed my education in nearby schools and colleges, I am very familiar with all of my villagers. While travelling, I often meet many elderly people and enquire about their health during my conversations with them. Many of them are above 70 years of age and have difficulties in vision and hearing. Most of them wear spectacles for correcting their vision, but just tend to ignore their hearing defects. Usually, it becomes the duty of the speaker to make them understand the talk by
repeating the sentence in a louder voice, only if they wish to continue the dialogue. This often spoils the entire joy of the conversation. This also tempts the younger generation to avoid the elderly completely from their dialogues. Thus, the elderly feel totally helpless and neglected in the most important stage of their lives.
When I got an opportunity to initiate academic research in an engineering college in the locality, the unanswered hearing problems of my place kept me pondering over it. I asked my old friends about their hearing problems, but none of them could satisfactorily explain the exact problems they were facing. They were not at all bothered about the sense of hearing in their old age. They believed that it was the vision problem that caused hindrance
* Mr. Tomson Devis, PhD Scholar from Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology, Kerala, is pursuing his research on “Low Complexity Hearing Aid Design”. His popular science story entitled “Can You Hear Me?” has been selected for AWSAR Award.