Free hearing aid/cochlear implant?
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Do any exist?
Never heard of that but I would recommend integrating the deaf community instead of this kind of risky surgical operation that, moreover, is basing the ability of a great part of communication (and the most important one) on a machine. Learning sign language is not a big deal and I think any loving family member is capable of it.
I also never heard of a hearing aid with free software and knowing someone using it that is using free software, if it would exist, their are chances that I would have heard about that.
I've asked this person about hearing aid and it looks like a woman made a speech in a RMLL (or something like that) stating that it was hard but somehow possible to use some free software to partly tune some old hearing aid.
It seems strange to me that this area hasn't had any activism from the FSF.
It might be because it doesn't consider those devices computers. Just as with SSDs, HDDs and printers.
But that's just my guess. And even if the guess is correct, I don't mean to judge FSF as doing sth right or wrong (seems too easy to cause a flame war about nonfree firmware here)
I'm not so sure:
> 22. two_front_teeth: Suppose your doctor
> told you that you needed a medical procedure
> to survive but that the procedure would
> require inserting a device inside of your
> body which ran proprietary software. Would
> you be willing to have the procedure done
> to save your life?
> RMS: The only way I could justify this is
> if I began developing a free replacement for
> that very program. It is ok to use a nonfree
> program for the purpose of developing its
> free replacement.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100731111641/http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/rms-ama.html
A hearing aid is not a circuit, it needs software calibration for each individual person (and this is not as simple as a volume switch), sometimes changing over the time of their life.
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