Most people don’t notice their hearing changing until they have to ask someone to repeat themselves at dinner or find themselves struggling to follow a conversation in a crowded room. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers want to help people pay attention sooner and give them the tools to act.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs is teaming up with the Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health to expand awareness of the Hearing Number, a tool that helps people measure and track their hearing over time. The goal is to make hearing something people monitor throughout their lives, just like blood pressure, steps, or sleep.
“The Hearing Number campaign is a public health initiative focused on giving people the language they need to understand and talk about their hearing,” said Molly Sheehan, the communications associate at the Cochlear Center. “We have so many ways to understand our sleep, our steps, our blood pressure, and other measures of wellness and health. These are widely understood, easy to access, and actionable.
“But how do we talk about hearing? This campaign aims to give people an easy way to understand their hearing, so they can use communications strategies and technologies that help them protect and optimize it.
CCP will receive more than $100,000 over the next seven months to support the next phase of the Cochlear Center’s ongoing campaign to establish hearing as a trackable metric, encourage people to embrace strategies and technologies to hear better and protect their hearing, and to reduce stigma around hearing loss and hearing care treatment.
The team will start by reviewing existing data and connecting with key audiences and will then host discussions and workshops to find out which messages and materials resonate, and to uncover barriers that keep people from seeking care for their hearing. From there, they’ll develop resources, test them with organizations like health departments, clinicians, and industry partners – as well as with end users – and refine the materials based on what they learn.
The work builds on CCP’s experience working with other teams at Johns Hopkins University to translate research into public health campaigns. For example, CCP has worked with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to turn patient-centered research into a campaign to raise awareness about the cancer-reducing benefits of salpingectomy, the surgical removal of the fallopian tubes.
The team is now applying a similar approach to hearing health.
An important tool for this campaign is the Hearing Number app. Created by the Bloomberg School and available in 10 languages globally on Android and iOS, this free app lets people learn, in decibels, the softest speech sound they can hear in each ear.
The Hearing Number is known clinically as the 4-frequency pure tone average, or the PTA4, which is the basis of the World Health Organization’s classification system for hearing. Everyone has two Hearing Numbers: one for their right ear and one for their left ear. The numbers can be as low as -10 dB and as high as 85 dB or more.
Children and young adults with healthy hearing can have Hearing Numbers as low as -10 dB. Over time, the number increases. The higher the number, the harder it is to hear and communicate in everyday spaces. Tracking the number over time helps people monitor the health of their hearing.
Hearing changes naturally over a lifetime. Researchers hope that knowing and tracking their Hearing Number will encourage people to value their hearing as an important part of their overall health and adopt consistent hearing protection strategies such as wearing ear plugs at loud concerts, ease conversations with providers, and reduce stigma around hearing care.
“We want people to track their Hearing Number the same way we track other vital statistics and health data throughout the life course,” says Erica Nybro, who is leading the work for CCP. “It’s about encouraging people to know their number, take care of their hearing, and get assistance if they need it.”
The team is also focused on measuring what works. “We have the site and the app, and now we’re working with CCP to make best use of partnerships and collaborations that we’ve developed,” Sheehan said. “CCP is helping us test messaging and materials so we can understand what resonates and what actually makes an impact.”
Sheehan emphasizes that a campaign is only useful if it helps people act on the information they get. “The app is meant to be informative, but we need to fill in the gaps to answer the question of once you know the number, where do you go from there,” she says. “We want to turn a one-time number into an actionable, ongoing part of health behavior.”
CCP and the Cochlear Center see the effort as a first step in a longer push to bring hearing into everyday health conversations.
“The hope is that people will start thinking about their hearing before problems arise,” Nybro says, “and treat it as a lifelong measure of health worth checking regularly.”
