Harnessing the Sun to Help People Hear: Company Promotes Solar Rechargeable Hearing Aids in Botswana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
You have accessThe ASHA LeaderWorld Beat1 May 2006Harnessing the Sun to Help People Hear: Company Promotes Solar Rechargeable Hearing Aids in Botswana Dannis Fafard Dannis Fafard Google Scholar More articles by this author https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.WB2.11062006.5 SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In I am a development worker for a unique hearing aid manufacturer that is making a name for itself in Botswana, Africa. Godisa Technologies Trust is located in the village of Otse, near the capital of Botswana. The native word Godisa means, “to do something that helps others to grow.” For a busy company, Godisa is surprisingly quiet-all the assemblers are deaf. In fact, the majority of employees are deaf and anyone who comes to Godisa enters their world. Everyone on the team is working together to provide low-cost technological solutions to economically disadvantaged people with hearing loss. We are achieving this by manufacturing affordable technologies such as a solar charger, which won an award as best new product in South Africa in 2004. We also manufacture rechargeable hearing aids, a portable ear mold laboratory, and the smallest audiometer in the world. Batswana (a name for the people of Botswana) who are deaf manufacture our products. They all have technical training in Canada. Since 2002, we have helped nearly 10,000 economically disadvantaged people by providing them with solar chargers that eliminate any operating costs associated with their hearing aids. This, in turn, empowers deaf Batswana by providing them with training and highly technical employment. We established the company in 1999 following a needs assessment. We worked with several experts in the field of hearing impairment to take the concept of combining solar energy and hearing aids to the next level-a product with mass appeal. We began designing a solar rechargeable hearing aid to address the needs of hearing impaired people from economically disadvantaged areas. We learned that we could modify existing hearing aids to make them rechargeable. The next step was to develop a solar charger that could recharge hearing aids directly without removing the batteries. After more than three years of operation, we are reevaluating the project. We would like to offer all users of hearing aids, regardless of the model they are using, an ideally designed solar charger. A slight modification of hearing aids by major manufacturers would provide the best-case scenario-the addition of two contacts on the side of hearing aids permits a solar charger to recharge them directly. We want to push as many boundaries as possible so that talented deaf Batswana will have the opportunity of doing what they aspire to do at Godisa. For example, we are currently looking at different programs offered by the Mackay Centre in Montreal, Canada, and other similar institutions where our deaf employees could continue their education. It is socially irresponsible to offer free hearing aids to economically disadvantaged people and then expect them to pay an average cost of $100 per year for batteries in the case of binaural hearing losses. We tend to forget that most people in Africa live on $1 a day. In the best-case scenario, where people need only one hearing aid, they still must work 50 days each year just to pay for their hearing aid batteries. Our solar charger is reducing these operating costs to zero. These solar charges are changing lives. And Godisa is living up to its name. Author Notes Dannis Fafard, is a development worker at Godisa. Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Additional Resources FiguresSourcesRelatedDetails Volume 11Issue 6May 2006 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library History Published in print: May 1, 2006 Metrics Downloaded 71 times Topicsasha-topicsleader_do_tagleader-topicsasha-article-typesCopyright & Permissions© 2006 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationLoading ...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.107 | 0.024 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".