A new exhibition is seeking to change peoples' perceptions of hearing aids and to make them more popular. Hearwear will run at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London until 5 March 2006 and aims to persuade people that hearing devices can be as trendy an item to wear as glasses now are. The exhibition is being put on by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), the design magazine Blueprint and the creative agency Wolff Olins.

Hearwear will feature the latest hearing aid designs, which are being made to look like fashionable jewellery and must-have gadgets. It is not just futuristic hearing aids that will be on display, however. A range of stylish devices that can be used by anyone to control sound will be showcased including a gadget which enables people to have a clear conversation in a noisy bar and a product called Goldfish which replays the last 10 seconds of conversation back to someone in case they want to catch up with something they missed.

Hearing difficulties is set to become one of the biggest health and social issues in the future because of a noise pollution and the fact that people are living longer. So says the UK's largest deaf charity, the RNID. They believe that the number of people who have some kind of hearing loss will rise from the current 1 in 7 over the coming years. They are therefore calling for a revolution in the way people think about hearing devices. They want to remove the stigma that many people attach to wearing hearing devices. The Hearwear exhibition is part of that education process.