A smartwatch app alerts users with hearing loss to nearby sounds

A new smartwatch app alerts users who are deaf or hard of hearing of nearby sounds, such as microwave beeps or car horns.

“The main motivation [for the app] came from my own experience, and conversations that my colleagues and I have had with deaf and hard of hearing people over several years,” says Dhruv Jain, who presented the system, called SoundWatch, at the virtual ASSETS conference on October 28.

Jain, who is hard of hearing, uses SoundWatch at home to avoid sleeping through a smoke alarm. “On a nature walk, it’ll tell me that there’s birds chirping, or there might be a waterfall nearby,” he says. “Those sounds make me feel more present and connected to the world.”

Sound awareness apps for smartphones exist. But Jain prefers the immediacy of sound notifications on his wrist, rather than in his pocket — and surveys of people who are deaf or hard of hearing show he’s not alone.

上海品茶夜网

The SoundWatch app pairs an Android smartwatch and phone. The watch records ambient noises and sends that data to the phone for processing. When the phone detects a sound of interest, the smartwatch vibrates and displays a notification.

Jain, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues designed the app to identify 20 noises. In experiments, SoundWatch correctly identified those 20 sounds 81.2 percent of the time. When set to listen only for urgent noises — a fire alarm, door knock or alarm clock — the app was 97.6 percent accurate. Eight deaf and hard of hearing people who used SoundWatch around a university campus gave the app broadly favorable reviews, but noted that the app misclassified some sounds in noisy outdoor settings.

Jain and colleagues are now working on a version of SoundWatch that users can train to recognize new sounds, such as their own house alarm, using just a few recordings.

相关文章Coronavirus cases are skyrocketing. Here’s what it will take to gain controlNovember is beginning to feel a lot like last March. In Europe, where the coronavirus was largely under control for much of the summer and fall, cases are skyrocketing nearly everywhere. Twenty countries, including the United Kingdom and France, have shuttered restaurants, introduced curfews or generally urged people to stay at home, though most schools […]

Huijia Lin proved that a master tool of cryptography is possibleA long-sought “holy grail” in cryptography is poised to change the way we protect sensitive information. Today’s standard encryption schemes take an all-or-nothing approach. Once scrambled, your data become inaccessible to anyone without the secret key. This has allowed for secure e-mail communication, the proliferation of online transactions and digital signatures. It allows tax and […]

Smruthi Karthikeyan turned to wastewater to get ahead of COVID-19Environmental engineer Smruthi Karthikeyan had spent just a couple of days working in her new lab at the University of California, San Diego when the state instituted its first coronavirus lockdown in March 2020. She’d been brought on as a postdoc by biologist Rob Knight to develop new techniques for studying how microbes in complex […]

The James Webb Space Telescope spied the earliest born stars yet seenSome of the earliest stars yet seen are now coming to light in one of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Formed roughly 800 million years after the Big Bang, the stars live in dense groups called globular clusters and surround a distant galaxy dubbed the Sparkler, astronomers report in the Oct. […]