Hearing loss affects all aspects of life. If you factor in what untreated hearing loss does to employment, you have a situation that is extremely expensive to society, both globally and nationally. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it amounts to a loss of approximately 750 billion dollars a year.
AWARENESS IN THE POLITICAL FIELD
This economic insight resulted in
the theme of this year’s World Hearing Day: ‘Make a sound investment’, where the aim was to raise awareness in the political field and get politicians and decision-makers across borders to take hearing loss far more seriously.
Research studies back up WHO’s calculations, and in 2016 the British Ear Foundation published a report considering hearing loss from a European perspective.
AWARENESS IN THE POLITICAL FIELD
Even though hearing loss has a huge impact on both education, work, health and well-being, it is still one of the most
overlooked health problems in Europe. An extremely costly problem, though.
According to WHO, around
16% of adult Europeans experience hearing loss severe enough to have a negative impact on their daily lives.
Importantly, people who are aware of their hearing loss can
take better control of their health and learn how they can live their lives in a way that is not only healthier but also smarter. Therefore, a lunch debate in the European Parliament entitled “Action for hearing loss: Make a sound investment” was established.
AWARENESS IN THE POLITICAL FIELD
Widex put
hearing loss on the political agenda too.
By equipping three Danish MEPs with customized ear moulds to imitate a moderate hearing loss, they were sent to work as hearing impaired for a couple of hours. Mid-afternoon they were given a hearing aid from each manufacturer to
experience how a hearing aid could make a difference in their work lives.
Check out their reactions
here.
WORK AS YOU DID BEFORE
Hearing loss is not an obstacle for the labour market. Or at least it shouldn’t be. At Widex we go to work every day to make this kind of sound investment to
help people with hearing loss work as they did before.
In recent years, the field of Audiology has recognized that the nature of the hearing aid processed sounds could affect the amount of listening effort that the listeners invest into understanding, and that the cognitive capacity of the individuals could affect the outcome of their effort.
EFFORTLESS HEARING
Thus, we argue that if we design the hearing aids with output that requires the least amount of effort from the listeners to understand, then such hearing aids will result in satisfaction for more people, regardless of their cognitive backgrounds.
This we call the
“Effortless Hearing” design rationale, and at Widex we have followed it since the
UNIQUE range (and continuing into the
BEYOND range). It allows us:
- To be generous in capturing the full range of sounds in the listeners’ environment
- To be accurate in purging the sounds that the listeners may not need
- To be innovative in processing the sounds that the listeners want.