Given the many organisational and bureaucratic hurdles involved, it is quite remarkable that something really presentable has emerged from a huge EU project with 29 partners, a duration of just under five years, five sub-projects
and around 80 man-years of work capacity, but the fact that a number of developments have already been launched on the market (e.g. the hearing test by telephone in several
European countries or the multilingual research version of the Oldenburg measurement programmes) is something quite special: On 28 January 2009, the EU project HearCom presented itself to a specialist audience in Brussels under the heading "Hearing Screening and new Technologies". On 28 January 2009, the EU HearCom project presented itself to a specialist audience in Brussels under the heading "Hearing Screening and new Technologies", focusing on hearing screening for adults, new wireless communication strategies for hearing aids, the auditory profile as a European standard for audiology and new hearing aid developments.
The specialist presentations, demonstrations and moderated discussions were accompanied by an exhibition of developments from the HearCom project to date. These ranged from the localisation test using virtual acoustics and the Master Hearing Aid as a prototype of a personal hearing system to the internet portal www.hearcom.eu, which offers a wide range of information, demonstrations and hearing tests for both professionals and interested patients.
"HearCom is coming to an end. It has demanded a lot of hard work and service from all of us - but without HearCom we would not have come so far in our international developments, e.g. for multilingual hearing tests," emphasised Prof. Dr Dr Birger Kollmeier, sub-project leader and member of the Board of Directors for Marketing, on the great success of the project.