The final year students of the Physics Engineering Department of IMU Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences including Bahattin Ahmet BEDIRHANDEDE, Boron ZOROĞLU and Muhammet DEMIRKAN developed a “Low-Cost Hearing Device“. as part of their graduation project.
Age-related hearing loss is known as a chronic condition which is caused by the abnormal functioning of the central hearing system and seen in 226 million people over the age of 65 all over the world. Since there is no definitive treatment for hearing loss, the use of hearing aids is a very common tool to rehabilitate individuals and improve their quality of life. Driven by this need, our students built a low-cost hearing aid designed to produce amplified sound for people with hearing loss. In the construction of the device, an integrated circuit consisting of 3 transistors, 2 capacitors, 4 resistors and 1 thermistor was used. As a working principle, the device can be used as a telephone headset by receiving the sounds coming from the environment with a pre-amplifier microphone and converting them into electrical signals, then amplifying and converting these electrical signals back into sound.
Our students spoke on the completion of the project and said that the low cost of the hearing aid they developed will be a significant contribution to good health and well-being as it will enhance sustainable access to an affordable healthcare. They also underlined that the sound quality for people with hearing loss can be increased accordingly with the device, increasing the quality of life for hearing impaired individuals by empowering them socioeconomically.
We congratulate our students who have developed an innovative solution to this incurable disease and wish them continued success.