Kuulotietoa

The modern living environment has traditionally been built for hearing people. The needs of hearing-impaired persons have more or less been neglected in practice until recent times.

Hard-of-hearing people have often been overlooked when building accessible environments. Too often the main focus is on visible accessibility and non-visible accessibility is badly managed. Providing assistive listening technologies, like induction loop systems, is not expensive compared to the benefits, especially when the need for them has already been taken into account in the design phase. All hearing aid users will benefit greatly from the installation of a well designed, properly calibrated and maintained induction loop system.

But how do you know where an induction loop system works well?

For years hearing associations have collected information about hearing experiences in public venues. The research has proved that the use of hearing loop or equivalent assistive listening technologies is not as widely spread as required by legislation. If they exist, hearing loop systems are often switched off, badly designed, uncalibrated, have installation problems or are simply broken. Qlu Ltd. has developed an induction-loop-quality measurement and mapping solution, which gives accurate data about the hearing environment for hearing aid users at every point of the measured space. The hearing environment is visualised on a map, which is on display in the venue and Qlu's internet service http://maps.qlu.fi/.

A well-designed hearing environment provides equal hearing experience also for hearing aid users

For hearing aid users well designed, properly installed and calibrated hearing loop systems are the easiest and cheapest hearing assistive systems.

The greatest difference between Induction Loops and other assistive listening technologies is that users do not need to be given a receiver; they already have one!