Solar-Powered Hearing Aid Brings Jobs to Deaf People, Sound to Disadvantaged

There's no catechism that the Solar Ear is an absurd innovation. Recently nominated as a Tech Award Laureate, the Solar Ear is a activity that makes audition aid technology affordable to anybody while accouterment jobs to associates of the deafened community.

Created by Howard Weinstein, the Solar Ear is a section of avant-garde technology that can advice accomplish big changes in millions of people's lives. Right now, 600 actor humans accept a audition impairment, but alone about 8 actor accept audition aids. The primary acumen is cost.

Hearing aids can run added than $750 per device, with batteries costing about $1 per week, and actual few allowance programs will awning the expense. Even if they do, it is generally just a baby portion, acute those with audition accident to allotment out hundreds or even bags of dollars out of pocket. If they can't allow it, they go after sound.

The Solar Ear is a agenda audition aid that can be recharged with solar power. The audition aid itself is beneath than $100, and the array - which lasts 2 to 3 years - is alone $1. That agency even hard-of-hearing humans in disadvantaged areas can assuredly accept admission to affordable audition assistance. When defective a charge, the audition accessory and array can be amid into a appropriate palm-sized solar charger, ensuring that even humans after admission to electricity still accept admission to sound.

On top of accouterment the allowance of complete to those who ability contrarily go after assistance, the Solar Ear activity extends advice far into the deafened association through application opportunities. All of the advisers alive on Solar Ear accessories are deaf.

The activity is currently in Brazil, Botswana, West Bank Palestine, and will aggrandize to Mexico, China, India, Canada during 2010.

And in a footfall that makes the activity even added humanitarian, the technology is not patented - it is accessible for chargeless so that the Solar Ear has a adventitious to ability added humans who charge it.

The Solar Ear activity creates a sustainable, replicable business venture, accouterment an affordable (yet priceless) artefact to those who charge it, and improves the lives of both harder of audition and deafened people. Now that is music to our ears.