Considerations on the Hearing Aid Market in Brazil

I enjoy researching and getting to know the hearing aid market. I like to discover possibilities, to detect opportunities. I truly believe that we can change people's lives for the better through hearing care with hearing aids.

Given this, it makes sense to write about the hearing aid market. About how we can serve a greater number of people who need our services and products.

According to the WHO, today 466 million people live with disabling hearing loss, that is, moderate or severe. And nearly 700 million with some degree of hearing loss. And that number could be even higher. Even so, less than 15% of them adopt the use of hearing aids worldwide. This percentage seems to be even lower in Brazil. It is estimated that 5% of the Brazilian population has adopted the use of hearing aids.

And when we talk about adopting hearing aids, we must remember that this is not an exclusive treatment for the elderly. Hearing loss can appear in any age group and due to different causes. But let me quote some details for the elderly population in Brazil. In 2019, the number of elderly people in Brazil reached 32.9 million. Data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) show that the population aging trend has been maintained and the number of people over 60 in the country is already higher than that of children under 9 years of age. The 7.5 million new seniors we gained from 2012 to 2019 represent a 29.5% increase in this age group. Recently, IBGE released a series of long-term projections on population growth in Brazil. One of them points to a slowdown in the pace of growth and a consequent inversion in our age pyramid, as we can see below:

At this point, I invite you to make a quick calculation: how many old people are there in your state or city? Considering that around 33% of them have a hearing loss, which elderly population could benefit from your services only in your city? S?o Paulo, for example, is among the states with the highest proportion of elderly people in the population: 11.6% of its inhabitants are over 60 years old. In the country as a whole, this participation is 10.8% and in the other States it is 10.6%.

And how many adopted the use of hearing aids?

Even though there are many private services here in the country and distribution through the government, the adoption rate is still very small. If the global average adoption rate for the use of hearing aids is already considered low at 25%, what can we say about the 5% estimated in Brazil? I would say that we have a lot of possibilities and opportunities. Of course, of those 95% that are not served, many are in regions that do not even have a professional. We would need an active public policy, in addition to regulations and training for the true performance of Teleaudiology. And there are also those who are in inner cities and who cannot access or are unable to move to cities with the service available, which also hinders the adoption rate for the use of hearing aids. I believe that one of the causes of the low adoption rate is the low capillarity of hearing health services, which are mostly concentrated in large cities and metropolises.

I really like this subject, I have done a lot of research and I usually read several studies and reports from the United States and Europe, such as MarkTrek and Eurotrak that seek to understand not only how access is given, but how this market works, what are the main demands of adopters and not adopters.

And it is very curious to read that many do not adopt the use of hearing aids because they think they hear well enough or that they find it too expensive or have other priorities. The difficulty people have in finding value in auditory rehabilitation when hearing loss still has little impact has led us to study increasingly assertive ways to demonstrate what is gained from hearing aids and what is lost from hearing deprivation .

Hearing deprivation may not be noticed at first, but it can lead to a series of negative consequences over time, until tinnitus, for example, can appear as a result of an untreated hearing loss. We also know that if treatment with hearing aids does not start right at the beginning, it will become increasingly difficult to adapt to using hearing aids. Another common effect is to have the ability to recognize speech in noise compromised over time, without the use of (well-adapted) hearing aids.

And taking a long time to adopt the use of hearing aids can be more expensive as technology with more features may be needed to meet everyday needs. The sooner treatment begins, the less money, time and effort will need to be invested.

But what about Brazil? What do we know today about why people with hearing loss don't use hearing aids?

This was the topic I researched during my MBA in Retail and Consumer Market and the research is available at the USP/Esalq Library - PECEGE. In 2020 I studied a sample of 967 people who have hearing loss and were prospected via social networks. So these are people who have a lot of access to information, who use the internet.

Of these, most had moderate and severe loss. I don't know if this reveals that few diagnose their mild loss or neglect this type of information on social media.

The factors most cited in the survey were not very different from those found in major research reports from Europe and the United States. The reason you still can't pay for them was fired the most cited. I understand that Brazil does not have an efficient public policy nor does health insurance provide significant subsidies. And if we were to look for more answers on this point, perhaps we would find little appreciation for the use of hearing aids. I suspect this because the other most mentioned points show how hearing loss is not a priority for those who have hearing loss but have not yet adopted the use of devices.

Faced with these findings came a series of questions. Many are related to how we demonstrate the benefits and create value for these people who come to us. How much we are failing to play our role as hearing care professionals. Findings on the adoption of hearing aids show the importance of retail creating ways to make devices available at more affordable prices, offering different forms of financing, highlighting tangible benefits, creating value through additional services and working to raise awareness of the consequences of a loss of hearing, both for the cognitive system and for the quality of life in general.

Figure: Factors that lead individuals with hearing loss to not adopt hearing aids. Source: Original research results.

Given this whole scenario, we can see the extent of our responsibility as audiologists or hearing care professionals and how much we need to expand our knowledge beyond Audiology and hearing aid best practices.

If you liked this text, leave your comment and share it on your social media. The more trained professionals, the more people we will be able to serve in our country with continental dimensions.