Join us in removing barriers to hearing care with a wheelchair ramp for our mobile hearing clinic.
Our new mobile hearing unit provides hearing screenings, comprehensive hearing evaluations, personalized recommendations and referrals, and free earplugs. Its mission is to bring essential hearing healthcare services to underserved communities across the state, particularly in rural areas where hearing loss and hazardous noise exposure are more prevalent and access to care is often limited.
We aim to offer these services at no cost to nonprofit organizations and community groups that would otherwise be unable to afford bringing the unit to their location. To make this possible, we must raise funds to support the ongoing operation of the unit, including maintenance, insurance, fuel, equipment, and staffing costs.
APARC began on Purdue University's campus in 2022 and expanded to Indianapolis in 2024. While APARC is a research lab, community engagement is at the heart of our mission. We actively participate in health fairs, farmers, markets, and community events, providing hearing testing and personalized recommendations to every participant.
Although our Indianapolis location has been highly successful, we recognized that many Hoosiers still lacked access to services. To bridge this gap, we purchased a mobile hearing unit in September 2025, enabling us to deliver the same high-quality audiology care and cutting-edge hearing research directly to communities across Indiana.
Since launching the mobile unit, we have traveled throughout the state, expanding access to care, reducing barriers to hearing health services, and collecting valuable data that advances hearing research and with the hope of improving outcomes statewide.
This project is critical because accessing our mobile hearing unit currently requires climbing two to three large steps. For many community members with mobility limitations, this presents a significant barrier, and for individuals who use wheelchairs, it makes receiving care impossible.
Because hearing loss becomes more common with age, many of the people we serve are older adults who may already face mobility challenges. Without a wheelchair-accessible entrance, some of our most vulnerable community members are unable to benefit from the services we provide.
A portable wheelchair ramp would allow us to bring truly accessible hearing care wherever we travel, ensuring that every individual, regardless of mobility level, can access hearing testing, research opportunities, and personalized hearing health recommendations. This investment would help us remove barriers, promote health equity, and fulfill our mission of serving all communities across Indiana.
We will use donated funds to purchase and install a wheelchair ramp or lift for our mobile hearing unit, ensuring accessible care for all community members.
If we are unable to secure funding, some community members will continue to be excluded from our services simply because they cannot safely enter the mobile unit. This would limit our ability to serve all members of the community and prevent us from achieving our goal of providing truly inclusive and accessible hearing care across Indiana.