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May 18, 2008
Solar-powered hearing aids help poor deaf folk
Did you know that there’s 250 million people around the world who are hearing-impaired? Even worse, two-thirds of them live in the developing world. Odds are, these people don’t have the type of money needed to buy conventional hearing aids, primarily because their expensive batteries last only about a week. What if you could design an affordable hearing aid for the world’s poor?
One man, Howard Weinstein, did such a thing. He helped develop a hearing aid that’s powered by the sun, eliminating the battery problem altogether. He was even able to put the very same deaf people to work, since the skill it takes to master sign language—”acute hand-eye coordination”—perfectly translates to soldering and other microelectronics work.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/06/solar-powered-hearing-aids-help-poor-deaf-folk/
Posted by 4HL on May 18, 2008 1:17 AM
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