Getting your daily dose of sun rays is believed to be very healthy. But getting them to power hearing aids is pretty novel concept. Why would anyone think of juicing up their hearing aids with solar energy when a mere $1 battery is all that it needs? Yeah that what folks like us can think but this doesn’t hold true for people living in some seriously undeveloped countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia cannot even afford that much amount. Even if some support groups from richer countries donate millions of standard hearing aids, those natives will not be able to get them working as a $1 a day is often the going wage there. That’s how the idea of solar powered hearing aids erupted.
The civic group World University Service of Canada had sent Howard Weinstein to Otse on a mission to set up a company that would provide affordable hearing aids to partially deaf Africans. And he succeeded in developing an AFFORDABLE hearing aid that’s simply 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.
Via Crunchgear
