What would you do if tomorrow you couldn’t hear the footsteps of a team pushing from A to B? Or if the dialogue of your favorite MMO suddenly went silent and you had to read all of the quest text?
That’s what the millions of gamers who suffer from hearing impairment—an issue that affects 466 million people globally. But nearly 60 percent of all hearing problems are preventable. So why don’t we focus on it nearly as much as we do other health factors?
Hearing awareness week is here to help change that. Falling on the first week of March each year, the World Health Organisation selects a theme and partners around the world participate to raise awareness, help prevent hearing loss and improve hearing care.
This year, the World Health Organisation has set a simple task: Get a hearing test done. Sounds simple, but the average person with a hearing issue takes six years before they do anything about. And that’s a number the team at Audeara hope to decrease drastically. In the UK, a study showed that, on average, 20 percent of people who have a hearing issue address it. Waiting six years, in a lot of cases, means it is already too late.
So why is this important to us as competitive gamers? The most common form of hearing damage comes from noise. The recommended listening time for a device that puts out 85 decibels of sound is 8 hours. Bump that volume up to 100 and it drops drastically to a mere 15 minutes. Most computers and personal devices range from 75db to a whopping 136 db. So turning your headphones up because you cant hear those footsteps coming is definitely doing more harm than good.
Audeara has developed technology to change that, however. Building a program that tests your hearing for you and assigns a profile so that you can hear audio the way it was intended by the engineers. This means that it picks up on your hearing strengths and witnesses and then builds an audio profile that syncs with your headphones to allow you to make sure you are hearing exactly what you are meant to be hearing. No two people have the same hearing profile, so why should you have a set of headphones that doesn’t give you options.
If you don’t have a set of Audeara headphones, that doesn’t mean you can’t get a hearing test done. Throughout world hearing week, there will be plenty of opportunities and testing centers open for you to use to get a check up. Just head on over to the official website to find out more about how you can prevent any future hearing problems.
