How device from the KAI engineers helps to recover hearing.
According to WHO data for 2016, 5% of the world's population - about 360 million people - live with hearing loss, which subsequently leads to disability; almost 32 million of them are children. That, in fact, hearing is an important condition for learning, communication and integration into society.
Today, the level of inclusiveness of the environment has become an indicator of the progressivity of a single state/region, but a huge number of people with disabilities, including by hearing, cannot lead a full life. That’s why every single device in hearing correction that is able to support or even improve the state of hard-of-hearing men, at least gives hope for improving the quality of their lifestyle. As a maximum - allows a person to become a full member of society. There is such a development at KNRTU-KAI. Its name is «Bekar».
Associate Professor at the Department of Special Technologies in Education at Kazan teaching and research and methodical center, Pavel Viktorovich Nakoryakov, told about how the device idea came from, about plans for the near future, and about the importance of an individual approach to hearing correction.
- How did you get the idea of «Bekar»?
- 30 years ago me and my colleagues [professors, doctors of technical sciences Anatoly Vasilyevich Kochergin and Grigory Ivanovich Pavlov] worked at Lastochkina school (Kazan boarding school. n.a. E. G. Lastochkina for children with disabilities), and once there was an accident with two pupils – they died under the car’s wheels, ‘cause they didn’t hear sounds of car coming next to them. The school teacher, audiologist, appealed to me with a request to make a device for other students in order to collect all the sounds of the speech range and apply to those frequencies that are heard by the deaf.
At first, we tried to solve this problem using the hardware method, then switched to modeling a hearing aid on a computer. In the end, we patented the method of transferring frequencies or transferring information from one frequency to another. Today, the leading hearing aid companies are producing behind-the-ear hearing aids that implement our principle.
More information about «Bekar» you can read here (Russian language only).
