Hearing Aid Awareness Week, which was introduced in 1995.

Hearing Aid Awareness Week, which was introduced in 1995.

Insufficient consumer awareness of state-of-the-art hearing-instrument technology—and a general tendency to deny the presence of a hearing problem—spurred IHS to dedicate the week to public education about hearing help available to those in need.

“Advances in hearing-instrument technology allows modern hearing aids to dramatically improve sound-recognition capabilities,” says IHS President James Ogurek, BC-HIS. He estimates that only one-fifth of the nation’s 31.5 million hearing-impaired citizens with a measurable loss that could benefit from hearing aids are using amplification. “It is important that people know of the great strides hearing-instrument technology has made in recent years."