Creation of the HearGlueEar device and resources
The hear glue ear headset and microphone kit as well as the app have been entirely created by expert-volunteers giving their time, knowledge and resources for free, in order to create the most affordable hearing tech that could be accessible to as many people as possible.
None of this would have been at all possible without the following incredible partners who seem to genuinely make the world a better place.
- Thank you Raspberry Pi https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-home/ (it wouldn’t have happened without you)
What the Raspberry Pi foundation achieves for young people and revolutionising education is extraordinary https://www.raspberrypi.org/
- Thank you to the National Deaf Children’s Society https://www.ndcs.org.uk/ (the largest UK children’s charity, constantly supporting patients and educating professionals) who kept the app going, shared resources and supported the project.
- Thank you Glue Ear Together https://glueeartogether.org.uk/ for your valued resources, and for building a glue ear community.
- Thank you Cambridge Global Health Partnerships https://cambridgeghp.org/ for supporting the reach into other health care systems.
- Thank you Cambridge Hearing Trust https://cambridgehearingtrust.co.uk/ for your initial belief (it wouldn’t have started without you) and funds to run the original research and enable the building of Hear Glue Ear app.
- Thank you Queens Hospital and Audiology Department Malawi ( just giving page for donated headsets to continue work in Malawi
- Thank you to Cambridgeshire Community Services (CCS) NHS Trust speech and language therapy team who contributed to the app and the research. Thank you CCS for allowing the intellectual property to remain with the founder to enable wider spread and adoption in a non-profit capacity.
Dr Tamsin Holland Brown
Tamsin works as a paediatrician in Cambridge. She specialises in children who are deaf. This led her focus on children with temporary hearing loss due to glue ear (a very common condition, where fluid builds up behind the ear drum, causing temporary deafness in young children), she adapted an affordable device to improve hearing and an app to improve childhood developmental skills to empower children and families to self manage glue ear well between appointments or when operations (known as grommet- insertion operations or tympanostomy tube operations) are unavailable. The device and the app won innovation and paediatric awards, with NICE ‘highly commending’ the app as a shared learning example and the UK app awards awarding ‘Children’s app of the year 2019’. Tamsin’s research and practical experience of implementing a device as well as several app’s into Clinical pathways led her to become an educator in Digital Health and Clinical entrepreneurship.