Hearing aids are a useful device for people who are diagnosed with certain degrees of deafness. However, we have to admit that when it comes to appearance, hearing aids clearly aren’t the winner. Kids, especially, feel embarrassed about wearing them because of the fear of looking different.
Sarah Ivermee from UK has a 4-year-old son named Freddie who was diagnosed as profoundly deaf in his right ear and moderately to severely deaf in his left ear when he was just 3 months old. The condition was caused by the cytomegalovirus that she acquired during her pregnancy.
Lucky for her, she didn’t have any problems with Freddie and his hearing aids – they were rarely off.
But eventually, the mother of two met other families whose children also use hearing aids, and she found that not all kids enjoy wearing them. Most youngsters think that they look plain and boring, and a lot of them were also embarrassed about wearing them because it made them look different.
A friend of theirs has a 9-year-old daughter who feels the same. Sarah happened to have some flowery stickers nail stickers lying around at their home, and she thought of giving them to the kid to decorate her aids.
The young girl absolutely loved the pretty results, and because of how simple of a solution it was, Sarah thought that there must be some kind of product in the market that did the same. But then, she learned that there was hardly anything out there that was ready to use and accessible, and that’s when an idea came.
After a whole lot of research and trial and error, Sarah finally launched Lugs in 2014, a company that sells custom-made kits to decorate hearing aids and cochlear implants.
The designs range from colorful flowers to popular superheroes, and it is guaranteed to make children everywhere feel proud of sporting their hearing devices.
“I am so pleased every time my inbox pings and I receive a thank you email accompanied with pictures of children wearing Lugs on their hearing devices and loving them. Needless to say, our son Freddie reaps the most benefit from the business, as he gets to choose new designs every month, making all his hearing friends at school very jealous!” Sarah wrote in a blog post on Limping Chicken.
Check out the gallery below to see some of Lugs’ coolest designs.
Image credits: Lugs