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Political tension between the United States and Mexico is making headlines with talk of disrupting longstanding trade deals and constructing a border wall. And then there's the story of Antonio Garcia. A mechanic from southern Sonora, he had been limping around on crutches for three years. His right leg was amputated below the knee after a motorcycle accident and buying a prosthetic leg was beyond his financial reach.
But he got the prosthesis just this January from a nonprofit that's a collaboration between Mexico and the U.S. It's called ARSOBO and it's working to transform the lives of low-income Mexicans with disabilities. The organization, whose name is an acronym that stands for Arizona/Sonora border, provides affordable prosthetics, specialized wheelchairs and hearing aids. "It's changing people's lives," said Duke Duncan, an 84-year-old American pediatrician who grew impatient with retirement after just three days. He co-founded ARSOBO seven years ago. [...] ARSOBO provides disabled people who were once isolated, depressed or begging on the streets the possibility of getting a job or going to school. Their signature product is an all-terrain wheelchair, originally developed by a nonprofit in California, that can navigate uneven sidewalks and rough roads.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Zinho on Monday July 10 2017, @05:30PM (6 children)
I'm curious whether the low-cost hearing aids are simply circumventing the FDA approval process, given that they're going exclusively to Mexico. Classifying hearing aids as "medical devices" makes a huge barrier to entry in this market; there's no reason why current technology in that space should be as stagnant as it is. These days we could easily fit a cheap DSP, microphone, and earphone together that would do far more than the current devices. Smartphone-controlled frequency band amplification is almost a gimme as well.
We've already covered this before. [soylentnews.org] Unfortunately, the bill we discussed last year died on the floor, [govtrack.us] and has now been reintroduced as the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act of 2017. [congress.gov] I'm not holding my breath for a sudden outbreak of common sense from the Senate.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10 2017, @07:51PM
You're interested in WHAT?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10 2017, @10:05PM (4 children)
Yeah. In Lawmakers Want Hearing Aids to be Easier to Get, but Doctors Object [soylentnews.org]
(nitwit AC) Fristy claimed that hearing aids are simply audio amplifiers (and another nitwit mod'd him up).
Down in that (sub)thread, driverless notes [soylentnews.org] that they are tuned to the individual's needs.
Grishnak nails it. [soylentnews.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @12:47AM (2 children)
Let's stick cheap, Chinese-made, battery-powered electronics in our ears. WCPGW!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @01:26AM (1 child)
Get yourself a button battery and put an ammeter directly across the terminals.
Report back with the reading you get.
Hint: The most you can pull from something the size of a aspirin is flea power.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @03:20AM
A button battery can easily drive a tiny loudspeaker close to your eardrums at volumes loud enough to damage (what's left) of your hearing.
One of the problems with those cheap Chinese hearing aids is they just amplify everything. A lot of people's hearing loss is at high frequencies. So they turn up the volume so they can make out what people are saying, and end up damaging the good part of their hearing.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday July 11 2017, @04:11AM
I totally agree; there's more to a hearing aid than just amplification. I also agree with the AC who responded to Grishnak:
The diagnosis piece could even be automated; Otoacoustic Emissions Tests are simple to automate, and pure tone audiometry could be baked into a tuning app for the earpieces/linked smartphone. The only problem is that no official app repository could carry that app in the U.S. since they'd get sued by the FDA. This field desperately needs modernization and there is no incentive in the current regulatory environment for the R&D to make that happen. It makes me sad.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin