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426 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
to their everyday movement and only that issue needed to be corrected. Some of them have not even heard about hearing aids, but, nevertheless, most of them believed that these devices were very costly and could not afford them, which is indeed a reality.
I discussed this scenario with my research guide, and she asked me to approach this problem with a signal processing background. We reviewed lots of literature and reports of the World Health Organization (WHO) about hearing. In the latest report in March 2019, WHO claimed that there were about 466 million people in the world suffering from hearing loss, and, among them, about 34 million were children. Besides, WHO warns that this number will rise to about 630 million in 2030 and 900 million in 2050. Studies have also revealed that about 30%–35% percent of adults were aged more than 65 years and about 40%–50% aged more than 75 years were badly affected by hearing loss. The untreated hearing impairments
may cause communication
problems in them, leading
to the feeling of loneliness,
social isolation, frustration,
etc. In addition to this, spoken
language development in
children is often delayed with
untreated hearing loss. But the
current production of hearing
aids lags behind the global
need by more than 90%. In
developing countries such as
India, this lag is more than 97%
and the cost of hearing aid is
also very high for the common
man to afford. Therefore, most
of the hearing problems of these
countries remain unresolved.
Thus, we decided that it was our
duty to design and build a cost-
effective hearing aid that could be affordable even to the underprivileged people of India.
The most common type of hearing impairment is sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). In SNHL, the sound perception of a person is reduced drastically due to the damage of sound-sensing hair cells in the inner ear and the nerves that carry the signals to the brain. This type of permanent hearing loss can affect people of any age group and is also seen at any frequency range. But fortunately, most of the SNHL can be corrected with a properly adjusted hearing aid. Another type of hearing loss called presbycusis affects most of the people as they grow older due to the diminishing performance of the hair cells. The major difference between SNHL and presbycusis is that while SNHL may occur at any frequency range, the hearing loss associated with presbycusis is usually greater for high-frequency sounds. Besides, presbycusis often occurs in both ears simultaneously. Since presbycusis occurs
gradually, people who have presbycusis may not be able to recognize that their ability to hear is diminishing and need some devices to assist them in hearing. From this information, I realized that the hearing loss of my old friends was mainly due to presbycusis.
A hearing aid is an assistive device used to make sounds louder so that a hearing- impaired person can listen, communicate and involve more effectively in everyday activities of his life. Analog hearing aids are very simple in structure and can only amplify the incoming sound along with the distracting background noise. This is enough for communication
between two persons nearby but very difficult to hear in noisy environments such
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.