Tell us about eargym
eargym is a digital step-by-step hearing care platform that provides a range of hearing and impact checks, enabling people to take control of their hearing health. People can train their hearing regularly through our app, using our brain training games which have been designed to improve auditory processing skills such as speech comprehension and the ability to locate sounds.
Our aim is to make it easy for people to test and train their hearing regularly and monitor any changes that might need to be seen by a healthcare professional. In a recent study, 83% of our users reported an improvement in their hearing after using our platform for 7 weeks.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
I’ve had a varied career path, but I’ve always been passionate about the concept of healthy ageing. After many years working as a DJ, I became increasingly aware of the physical side effects of this career choice, and decided to switch paths to work in a more health-focused capacity. I became interested in the area of hearing health after I realised I was struggling with noise-related hearing loss myself, from all my years of working in the music industry.
I met my co-founder, Amanda, after participating in the Zinc Accelerator, a project aimed at building businesses that can improve the quality of later life for millions of people. We were both passionate about working in the hearing loss space, as well as the relatively unknown side effects – for example, the link between hearing loss and dementia.
We decided to launch eargym together as we wanted to help raise awareness about hearing loss and address the social and cognitive impacts of hearing loss. We founded eargym to encourage people to take better care of their hearing. Our app has been downloaded over 17k times to date.
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How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
We launched our start-up from scratch in May 2020, with just the two of us on the project. Now, three and a half years later, we have an incredible and dedicated team of 12 working across the business in roles from UX and design to research. We’ve also set up some exciting partnerships with leading research organisations such as the Alzheimer’s Society.
What can we hope to see from eargym in the future?
We want to make hearing care part of mainstream conversation and accessible to all. We’re looking forward to seeing more people sign up to eargym and start training their hearing. We hope that this will help normalise discussions around hearing loss and the benefits of hearing training.
More specifically, want to work with employers and businesses to provide employees with access to hearing training as a workplace benefit.
We’re also thrilled to be participating in multiple research projects which are furthering academic inquiry into how caring for our hearing can improve our quality of life.
Our research, conducted in partnership with the Alzheimer’s Society is working to further investigate the link between hearing loss and dementia, and how hearing training can help with this. We hope to continue to contribute to industry-leading hearing loss research.
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