by Patrick deHahn

“Zoom meetings. FaceTime calls. Birthday parties, coffee chats, game nights, and happy hours over video chat.

“As work and life events go remote, people are increasingly sharing the feeling of ‘Zoom fatigue.’ Little do they know they’re experiencing a sliver of what the deaf and hard of hearing undergo every day.

“It’s called ‘concentration fatigue,’ a concept audiologists and researchers have expanded on.

“’It’s not necessarily persistent fatigue but surely a measurable increase in listening effort,’ Mario Svirsky, professor of hearing science at NYU Langone Health medical center, told Quartz. ‘A little noise in the background can bring you over a tipping point where communication becomes much more difficult and you have to do a lot of work. You may participate in a meeting focusing on everything for the full two hours and, at the end, you are wiped out.’”

Read this article in its entirety at Quartz.