Innovations Item Code: IN-2024-2100338
Sector: Health/Telemedicine
Description:
Globally, 432 million people are afflicted with disabling hearing impairment and these figures will increase to 700 million by 2050. About 80% of individuals with disabling hearing loss live in developing countries (though pockets of underserved groups exist in developed nations).
Good quality hearing aids are unaffordable to majority for people living in Africa and Southeast Asia where the burden of hearing loss is most severe. The hearing aids also requires expensive proprietary batteries that needs to be changed often. Personal sound amplifiers which appear cheap are often ineffective and irritable to most patients and PSA devices are readily discarded by the patients. Moreover, is an acute shortage of health workers in these countries. Inadequate training and migration to richer countries have kept the numbers of otologists and audiologists hearing professionals in Africa low. Majority of the African population live in rural areas, regions that are not attractive to health professional2. Thus, there is a large unmet need for quality hearing interventions for individuals with hearing loss in regions where the need is greatest.
Addressing this goal led to efforts to develop Chord hearing aid, a top quality, affordable digital smart premium device. It is a self-programmable device eliminating the need for tuning by audiologists. Chord hearing aid was developed in conjunction with Innov8 Hub, and biomedical engineers from MakeLab, Israel. The proof of concept of the device, (with a commercial target price band of US$ 250) has been developed and functional.
Stage of Innovation: Proof of Concept (You have created something to show the innovation can work)
Problem:
Hearing impairment is the most common disability worldwide, imposing a heavy social and economic burden on both individuals and countries1. World Health Organization estimates that unaddressed hearing loss imposes an annual global cost of US$ 980 billion, including health and educational support sector costs, loss of productivity, and societal costs1. In the communal setting of the African culture, hearing impaired people may suffer from social stigmatization and isolation. Children with hearing impairment experience delayed development of speech, language, and cognitive skills, and this can lead to slow learning and difficult progress in school. Among adults, impairment of hearing makes it difficult to obtain and keep employment. The burden of this handicap falls mainly on the poor who are unable to afford hearing aids to ameliorate the condition. This makes escape from the vicious stranglehold of poverty harder by isolating the sufferers and slowing progress at school and work.
Existing hearing aids are unaffordable for most of the citizenry in low- and medium-income countries. That is an unmet need of about 250 million people in Africa and Southeast Asia. Personal sound amplifiers – though cheap are unsatisfactory and indeed irritable for patients with hearing loss due to the non-selective sound amplification.
Unique Selling Point: The standard line of management is to prescribe hearing aids for patients with hearing loss. This entails ordering for the product from North America and Europe for top quality versions, or from South east Asia and China for cheaper but lesser in quality versions. In Africa, 136 million people suffer from disabling hearing loss. Within the next two decades, the figures will triple in magnitude. Majority of these people do not have access to required interventions. A similar scenario is seen in Southeast Asia, in countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. A major obstacle for the masses with hearing loss is the high cost of procuring quality hearing aids, and the added high costs of maintaining these aids since many of the aids come proprietary batteries that are expensive and requires frequent replacement. Paucity of audiologists required for hearing aid tuning is an additional layer to the obstacles faced in procuring hearing aid. Chord hearing aid aims to solve all these obstacles with a single affordable smart device. Chord hearing aid was designed to overcome all these challenges, it is cheaper via utilization of off-the-shelf components, has longer battery life and creatively engineered to deliver outputs comparable to premium devices. Moreover, Chord hearing aid is self-programmable device eliminating the need for programming by audiologists (there are very few audiologists in low- and medium-income countries).