Celebrating World Hearing Day: discover Macquarie Park’s hearing ecosystem
Did you know there are 4 million Australians living with hearing loss, predicted to increase to almost 9 million people by 2050? It’s one of the reasons Macquarie Park’s hearing health ecosystem is growing.
Our innovation district is an international centre for hearing health, hosting some of Australia’s best hearing and vision researchers, service providers and R&D pioneers. Ahead of World Hearing Day let’s take a tour to mark the event:
The Australian Hearing Hub (University Avenue) is Macquarie Park’s “innovation district within an innovation district”, uniting researchers, educators, clinicians and innovators with expertise in linguistics, audiology, speech pathology, cognitive and language sciences, psychology, nanofabrication and engineering sciences under one roof.
Members include Hearing Australia, the National Acoustic Laboratories (NAL), The Shepherd Centre, NextSense and Macquarie University Speech and Hearing Clinic, who share research spaces including an anechoic chamber, an audiometric room and an electromagnetically shielded control room.
Hearing MedTech giant Cochlear have their global headquarters just across the road, a location it credits as vital to productive research and collaboration – as well as being a centre of advanced hearing aid manufacturing in its own right.
Meanwhile Danish hearing technology group Demant recently moved into their new Australian headquarters at MPark on 11 Khartoum Road. Their Danish neighbours GN ReSound are also based in Macquarie Park, on nearby Khartoum Road.
Over on Culloden Road NextSense are set to open the doors of their brand new state-of-the-art headquarters soon, with space for 300 employees, a specialist school, pre-school and custom therapy spaces.
The NextSense Centre for Innovation will deliver services including speech pathology, audiology, and hearing and vision early interventions for children.
NextSense Chief Executive, Chris Rehn, dubbed Macquarie Park’s innovative culture a ‘game changer’ in this division of specialist care:
“Situated in one of Australia’s leading innovation districts – Macquarie Park – our new centre will be at the heart of a broader ecosystem that will help to build a more inclusive Australia”, he said.
According to the World Health Organisation unaddressed hearing loss poses an annual cost of nearly US$1 trillion globally. A recent study found the global market for audiology devices – like hearing aids and Cochlear implants – will grow to $20.13billion AUD by 2031 to meet demand, an 82% increase in just 10 years.
