Clearly Going Places
ClearMask™ in use in the classroom
Entrepreneur Allysa Dittmar, profoundly deaf since birth, tells Margaret Rooke how a distressing surgical experience led to her co-founding ClearMask, now employing 250 people, and earning her a place on the Forbes under-30 list of top innovators to watch.
As I was being wheeled into surgery for an operation a nurse told me quite suddenly that, due to an administrative error, the sign language interpreter I’d requested to assist me wouldn’t be present. I have been profoundly deaf since birth and this was shocking news, presented to me at a shocking time. Inside the operating room, I was unable to read the lips of my surgery team or see the expressions on their faces. Their masks hid all of this. I presume they gave me instructions, asked me some questions, maybe said a few words to reassure me – but I couldn’t see any of it, not even a smile.
The whole experience felt dehumanising and unsafe. I was 23 at that time and, ever since I could remember, I’d depended on visual cues, sign language, and lipreading every day of my life to connect and converse with others. Even for people who can hear, so much of communication is in the face. For me and others who have hearing loss, access to facial expressions is everything.
What happened to me in that operating theatre six years ago never left me. In fact, it launched my career in public health and advocacy. I knew I didn’t want to go through another dehumanising experience, or have it happen to anyone else. There had to be an alternative to traditional masks that hide so much of our faces away, remove human connection, and leave us questioning what’s being communicated and expressed.
I was born in New Jersey, USA, into a hearing family; my deafness is the result of a rare gene. My father, who worked in our family’s insurance agency for nearly his entire career, and my mother, who left her career to raise my older brother and I, did all they could to support me.
ACCESS TO THE WORLD
A physical therapist wearing ClearMask™
But I felt different, growing up. It wasn’t easy being deaf in a hearing family and in a hearing-dominated world. I felt like the only outsider in many situations – socially, academically; even at home. Whether it was at the dinner table or on the school bus, I knew I was not like everyone else.
Looking back, the best way my parents supported me was turning to the deaf and hard of hearing community for guidance and support and choosing sign language as my primary language. They aimed to do all they could to help me thrive in both the hearing and deaf worlds.
They decided to send me to a state school for the deaf until I was five and then into mainstream education with sign language interpreters. There, my interpreter and I taught my teachers, classmates, and friends some signs. It wasn’t perfect, but it made a difference. I was determined to do well in school and so many people worked hard to support me.
But ever since I was young, I knew my education experience was different. I had to put in more hours to catch up on what I may have missed or not understood during my classes, all the way through from elementary to graduate school. I never wanted to miss out on anything. I view that as everyone’s fundamental right – access to the world.
Everyone who helped me during my education built my sense of confidence as a young deaf woman, capable of doing anything I set my heart and mind to do.
After high school, I attended the Johns Hopkins University to study for an undergraduate degree in public health. I was the first student there to use interpreters. It had never occurred to me to take a safer option and choose a school more experienced with deaf students. I always wanted to go to the best college, no matter how challenging it might be.
Many of my professors and classmates had never met a deaf student before, so it was a daunting and isolating experience at times. I spent many hours and significant effort educating those around me, but I realise this was teaching me to become a well-seasoned and practiced advocate for others. By showing professors and other students what I needed, I was explaining what others needed, too.
While at college I faced the deepest tragedy in my personal life when I lost my mother to suicide. We’d been extremely close, and my world turned upside down. I learnt in the worst possible way about the importance of mental health and equal access to healthcare, not only for deaf and hard of hearing people, but for everyone.
This immense loss could have derailed me, but I’ve always tried to turn my challenges into something for the good, as difficult as this can sometimes be.
I continued with a Master’s degree and made the decision to study health disparities within the deaf and hard of hearing communities at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. I’d experienced barriers in accessing healthcare long before my surgery experience. Statistically, deaf individuals experience worse health outcomes than their hearing counterparts for many reasons, including a lack of access to quality communication in medical care. Nothing could be clearer: we need qualified interpreters and culturally competent medical staff who’ve had appropriate training; elements that I’ve rarely experienced in my life.
The other thing we need are transparent masks that show the full faces of caregivers, providers, and family. At Johns Hopkins, I organised a team of fellow students and alumni to design and create one. Our team spent three years on fundraising, research, customer validation and product development. We made hundreds of prototypes to test our design for comfort, fit, anti-fogging, and mass-production. We finally submitted our product, ClearMask™ to the US Food and Drug Administration and received clearance in April 2020 as the world’s first and only fully transparent mask approved by the FDA. We started shipping them out a month later.
KNOCKING DOWN BARRIERS
Allysa, President of ClearMask, with one of her co-founders and company CEO, Aaron Hsu
It turns out that our biggest customers have not been the deaf and hard of hearing communities but international, national, and state governments; hospitals who purchase them for paediatrics, older individuals and patients with dementia; schools who use them for early childhood education or specific student populations such as children with autism; and businesses who support a positive and safe customer experience and workplace. It’s been incredible to see a growing, widespread recognition of how regular, traditional masks impede natural communication.
Of course, as we worked to develop our device, the team could never have predicted mask-wearing becoming universal because of the pandemic.
As soon as we saw the pandemic was becoming a full-blown public health crisis, our team met to come up with a rapid roll-out plan. We made decisions in just days instead of weeks or months.
I remember taking a flight a day before the crisis was formally declared a public health emergency in the US. I looked around and saw some people on the flight wearing masks. It seemed so odd. I had the realisation that masks were going to become the norm for some period of time and that this would be a significant communication barrier for all of us, but especially for deaf people. More than 55% of communication is visual for someone with typical hearing. This percentage is even larger for deaf people. For people who communicate through sign language, access to the full face is vital.
Altogether, we’ve sold over 17m masks worldwide with our message ‘see the person, not the mask’. We’ve expanded from a team of just the four co- founders to more than 250 staff.
We’ve also established a charitable side to the business. We provide our transparent masks for free to organisations that need them most, including schools, clinics, and social support groups. For so many different groups of children and adults, it’s incredibly helpful to see the facial expressions to build rapport and understanding.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as busy in my life as I am now, frequently working 80-hour weeks. My education has trained me well for working harder and adapting constantly to the environment around me. Just like I did at school, I educate others on how best to communicate and work with me on a daily basis, through interpreters, Zoom, and the written word.
Yet, even now, I have moments where I wish I hadn’t gone through my experience in the operating room. It actually makes wearing a mask difficult for me, often reminding me of what happened six years ago. But I’m so aware that millions have been helped by ClearMask and I know that this experience has only increased my focus and resolve.
All my life, I’ve needed to knock down the barriers and challenges in front of me; to stand up for myself and others. As a result, I’ve been able to forge my own path as a deaf person and make my own impact in the world.