Project Listen Up - Testing Infant Hearing in India

Neeti Kailas wants to improve the quality of life for hearing impaired children through early detection. Her long term goal is to transform healthcare in India and in the short term she has created a portable and noninvasive device to screen newborns for hearing issues.

Kailas attended the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Gujarat and redesigned bedpans for use in crowded Indian hospitals. She realized that the best way to maximize her impact on Indian society was to work in the healthcare industry. One of her best quotes says that social change is “never going to happen by designing the next lemon squeezer.”

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Photo: ©Nitin Sisodia/ 2014

A childhood friend with hearing loss was the other big factor in Neeti’s design inspiration. She says that every year around 100,000 children are born in India with hearing impairments and no screening exists formally to detect hearing loss. The tests that do exist require specially trained workers and expensive equipment, and some tests require the baby to be sedated.

Kailas designed an apparatus that uses three electrodes placed on the baby’s head in the form of a headband. The electrodes give stimulation and then look for electrical responses. If the infant brain does not respond to the stimulus then the child cannot hear. The stimulus / response mechanism is very important for Kailas because she says that health clinics in India are incredibly crowded and noisy.

Through her company the Sohum Innovation Lab Netti has created this prototype of the device and hopes to launch in Indian hospitals in early 2016. Early focus will be on hospital births and the goal of screening two percent of all births in India each year. Kailas was named a Rolex Laureate in 2014 as part of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

Kailas and her Project Listen Up team are doing amazing work and her vision of bringing a better level of life quality to India is definitely inspirational. It’s great to see that activity is rolling fast on the 2016 launch but there are also initiatives toward creating an after-care network of audiologists to watch the children as they grow.