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Asked by Matt Hooi - Gray to Sonia, Nick, Lizzie, Andrew on 17 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Chirag6000.
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Elizabeth Kapasa answered on 17 Jun 2015:
Well I’m still pretty young in my career so I receive help more than give it. But I like to think that I helped my coursemates, and my co-workers with their work. Also, if this children’s book inspires young people like you to become engineers (or study other STEM disciplines) then I guess I will have changed people’s lives in career. So far my younger cousin who read the book said he wants to become an engineer – I hope so!
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anon answered on 17 Jun 2015:
It’s too many to count. In general most patients who receive a cochlear implant have would have a much better quality of life. Just being able to communicate is something we all take for granted. In machine if you are not able to talk on the phone, with a severe hearing loss you may need to ask people to repeat themselves. The work load on your brain increases as you try and fill in the gaps in sentences because you only heard part of the conversation by guessing or lip reading. Eventually the deaf withdraw into their own world avoid social occasions and rely heavily on their partners or children. After the implant we give these patients a new lease of life and have their independence back. A lot of the patients had to give up their jobs because they can no longer hear, after the implant many are back in full time employment
For children we give them the ability to hear and gain language. If a child has not heard by the time they are 6 or 8 years old. The ability to gain language is lost because that area of the brain used to process language get overwritten and is used for other things like processing vision.
Most of our paediatric patients should go on to have a near normal life they may have learning assistants at school but they will go to a mainstream school. There are still schools for the deaf which cater for those deaf children with and without cochlear implants.
So each child who receives an implant will have similar opportunities to those have normal hearing, but the department’s view is the implanted children should have total communication so they are encouraged to learn British Sign Language so they can still communicate with their deaf peers. And have the same opportunities afforded to every normal hearing child.
I am part of a team and who gives people the opportunity for a more normal life.
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Andrew Phillips answered on 19 Jun 2015:
It was really nice to hear that in one of the UCAS applications, written by students who want to come to Imperial, that one student had decided to do engineering after coming to one of the workshops that I run for the Royal Institution. That was amazing to hear! It would be great to get funding from this competition to build an online resource so that the workshop can be accessed by lots more children, and hopefully get more people into engineering.
I know my group and the people I work with have improved many people’s lives. Often engineers are the people who work in the background and so don’t have direct contact with individual patients for example. I don’t think that should bother us. In my teaching I always hope that more students will stay in engineering, and won’t be tempted to go into another profession.
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