The Know Your Hearing public health campaign
Many of us know our height, weight, vision, and perhaps blood pressure. But what about our hearing? Our ability to hear is foundational to our emotional, physical, and cognitive health. Yet, there hasn’t been a consistent metric that allows us to understand and talk about our hearing.
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health launched the Know Your Hearing campaign to introduce the Hearing Number as a common metric for hearing. The Hearing Number is the 4-frequency pure tone average, or PTA4, and it tells you the softest speech sound you can hear. Everyone has two Hearing Numbers: one for the left ear and one for the right ear. The numbers can range from -10 to 100 dB and can be directly applied to the broad categories that health organizations use to define levels of hearing loss. These categories include:
- Mild, which is a Hearing Number of 20 to 34
- Moderate, which is a Hearing Number of 35 to 49
- Moderately severe, which is a Hearing Number of 50 to 64
- Severe, which is a Hearing Number of 65 to 79
Source: World report on hearing. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2021.
This public health campaign aims to create broad acceptance of the Hearing Number as a tool for understanding and communicating about hearing. Embracing this simple number is a step toward:
- Improving the way people understand and talk about their own hearing.
- Destigmatizing hearing loss.
- Empowering people to protect their hearing and adopt strategies to hear better.
