Celebrate with us!
Sham, a little 6-year-old girl in excitement of hearing again, cried out to her dad, “Papa!” as the smile on her face was ear to ear.
In April 2023, 3DP4ME successfully completed our Hearing Express pilot in Jordan. We provided 52 children (ages 6 -12 years for girls and boys equally), who suffer from hearing loss with high quality hearing aid solutions.
The pilot included all stages from patient acquisition to 3D scanning, production and fitting. This allowed for testing and learning at every stage while fine-tuning the service and production process.
The Hearing Express project is focused on providing access to custom hearing aids to underserved communities. To leverage mobile ear scanning technology and 3D printing production, we built a custom AWS cloud software, this allows us to scale.
3DP4ME addresses the full lifecycle of hearing healthcare. With hearing aids, beneficiaries receive either rechargeable kits or traditional batteries, depending on the severity of their hearing loss. We then follow up with each child on a regular basis for maintenance. To ensure the greatest impact, we provide up to 20 sessions of speech therapy for each beneficiary so they can reach their full potential.
Through restored hearing, children and adults are able to participate in society without suffering the limitations of hearing loss. In that way their dignity is restored, and they gain additional access to education and potential work opportunities. We believe a hearing aid combined with speech therapy, can empower each child and their family to hope for a brighter future. (A child who improves their communication skills, is less likely to feel isolated. Instead, they can feel more of an integral part of a larger community. These hearing benefits multiply over time within the family and across the community as the individual can better achieve their full potential.
For 2023 the goal is to help another 50 individuals in need of hearing aid solutions, further fine-tune our unique model, and invest for scale. In 2024, we plan to double production and provide another 200 individuals with hearing aids and explore additional ways to reach underserved communities. We will focus over the next two years on capacity building across the client acquisition, production and service lifecycle and partner expansion so that by 2025 and beyond, thousands of people can receive hearing aids that need them. In order to become less reliant on international experts, we will focus on training local staff to complete the “technology transfer” and to ensure long-term sustainability of our efforts.
The budget for the period of July 2023 through December 2024 (18 months) is $600,000. This includes hiring four new staff members, a family relations manager to work with our patients and their communities, two technicians and a community health worker. With this expanded local expertise, a growing partner network, and ongoing individual and institutional support, we are excited to build upon the initial Hearing Express pilot success and make a difference for the underserved communities we support!
