‘A hearing impairment or hearing loss is a full or partial decrease in the ability to detect or understand sounds.... Loss of the ability to detect some frequencies, or to detect low-amplitude sounds that an organism naturally detects, is a hearing impairment.”
This is how the Wikipedia describes hearing impairment. In common man’s terms, we would call such a condition deafness or partial deafness. But it is politically correct to refer to it as ‘hearing impairment’ and the person suffering from it as hearing impaired.
Hearing impairment might occur at an early age or a later stage in life.
There are people who are born with this condition and this is due to genetic defects. Deafness can be inherited and passed down from parent to child.
Then there are those who are afflicted by this condition at a later stage of their life. This could be as a result of either long-term exposure to loud noise, medications or even as a side-effect of an illness, like measles or meningitis, among other reasons.
These days a person with hearing impairment does not need to allow his disability to make his life difficult. Today, science has come up with so many gadgets that can make life much easy and normal for a person who does not have 100 per cent hearing.
On this site, there are examples of many such products that can help a hearing impaired person lead his day-to-day life quite comfortable. There are alarm clocks, amplified phones, signaling devices and earphones/headphones. Also available are baby monitors which send signals when the baby cries, thereby allowing freedom of movement. And very handy are the Personal FM Systems which provide excellent assistive listening needs.