Vocational Rehabilitation of Persons With Hearing Impairment: A Step Towards Inclusive Development

Introduction

Ears are delicate and have complex mechanisms for many functions and not for just hearing per se. A well-functioning ear can make you hear very soft sounds over a wide range of frequency as well as withstand very loud sounds. It can also discriminate between sounds of varying pitch and intensity and locate the source of a sound. Various reasons of damage to ear like disease process, any physical trauma, exposure to excessive noise, drugs or simply the process of aging, may result in malfunction. This further may result in varying degrees of deafness which is also known as ‘Hearing Impairment’.

Hearing impairment may be understood as a partial or complete inability to hear from one or both ears at a desired or even enhanced frequency. It may be congenital or acquired, and temporary or permanent. Hearing impairment is one of the most frequently experienced sensory deficits in the human population, and it affects more than 250 million people worldwide. Its consequences could be reduced capacity to understand speech sounds, communicate, and delay in language development, educational and economic backwardness, social isolation and stigmatization (Singh, 2015). The various types of hearing impairment are described in Table 1(Nagaraja, 2002).

*dB-Decibel