Better Hearing = Better Lives
Providing access to affordable hearing aids improves lives, allows children to attend school, and grow up healthy, happy, and productive. World Wide Hearing creates the opportunity for hearing-impaired individuals to connect to their family and friends, to feel safe and confident, and to realize their full potential.
Your donation has a transformational impact on a child’s life: hearing aids trigger the ability to learn, to speak and to be understood, to belong to a community, and to pursue one’s dreams.
Impact in Developing Countries
World Wide Hearing wanted to demonstrate the impact of receiving a hearing aid, so we conducted the world’s first study to measure the impact of hearing aids on the lives of low-income people in a developing country. We also looked at the lives of people with untreated hearing loss to understand the challenges they face. Here are our key findings:
People with hearing loss:
- Were significantly poorer than people without disabling hearing loss
- Were twice as likely to have symptoms of depression
- Had a significantly poorer quality of life
After receiving hearing aids:
- 82% were satisfied with their hearing aids
- 71% of people used them daily
- 78% used them for at least four hours per day
The use of hearing aids created a significant improvement in mental health & wellbeing, including:
- Reduction in moderate-severe symptoms of depression
- 86% of case participants reported that hearing aids increased their self-confidence
- 88% of case participants reported that hearing aids had positively changed their enjoyment of life
- 23% felt safer wearing their hearing aids
- 56% reported that the most significant benefit of wearing hearing aids had been the ability to communicate with family and friends
World Wide Hearing hopes that these results will galvanize efforts to address hearing loss and ensure a better life for all affected.
Download the Executive Summary (8 pages) or download the complete Research Summary Report (120 pages).
