By Krish Kapoor deciBel by Juhi Shah
Thesis Statement:
Education – To understand the challenges faced in the education of a hearing- impaired person and how can we help them overcome it so that they can lead a conventional life.
Hearing impairment is a partial or total inability to hear. There are 466 million people with hearing impairment in the world and 5 million in India. Hearing impairment and its effects are not visible to people hence the deaf suffer in silence. Deafness often provokes ridicules rather than sympathy. A person who is hearing impaired is isolated from family and friends and greeted with unsympathetic attitude.
The consequences for a child born with hearing loss are quite severe. A child with hearing loss cannot develop speech and language abilities. This puts the child at a disadvantage in school and higher education as the dropout rate are higher and limits their future professional opportunities. 21% of children fail to get basic education and more than 3 million people are unemployed in the country.
We started with understanding the ecosystem and interacted with all the stakeholders within it. Then we visited schools and homes of children and looked at the teaching methods used by teachers and parents and started looking for gaps in the education system. To further understand the problem, we conducted sprints and started mapping down opportunity areas that we could potentially be working on.
We realised that comprehending data is very difficult for them, also they have problems in memorization and articulation. Thus we decided to work around these areas.
