Scientists develop ultra-low-cost device for hearing loss

Scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have designed an ultra-low-cost hearing aid that could be built with cheaply available open-source parts, an innovation that can help hundreds of millions of older people worldwide who can’t afford existing forms of the sound amplifying device.
“The challenge we set for ourselves was to build a minimalist hearing aid, determine how good it would be and ask how useful it would be to the millions of people who could use it,” said study co-author M. Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US.
The prototype, known as LoCHAid and described in the journal PLOS ONE, is expected to meet most of the targets set by the World Health Organization (WHO) for hearing aids aimed at mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss, the researchers said.
According to the scientists, modern hearing aids use digital signal processors to adjust sound, and are relatively expensive and power hungry.
So they decided to build their device using less expensive electronic filters to shape the frequency response. The researchers said this approach was standard on hearing aids before the processors became widely available.
“Taking a standard such as linear gain response and shaping it using filters dramatically reduces the cost and the effort required for programming,” said Soham Sinha, another co-author of the study, who was born in semi-rural India and is a long-term user of hearing aid technology.
“I was born with hearing loss and didn’t get hearing aids until I was in high school,” said Sinha, who worked on the project while at Georgia Institute of Technology, and at Stanford University in the US.
“This project represented for me an opportunity to learn what I could do to help others who may be in the same situation as me but not have the resources to obtain hearing aids,” he added.
According to Bhamla, the electronic components of the LoCHAid cost less than one USD if purchased in bulk, but that doesn’t include assembly or distribution costs. (PTI)