Can A Smartwatch App Solve Deafness?
Do you know someone who is deaf or hard of hearing? A new smartwatch app has been developed that alerts users who are dear or hard of hearing of nearby sounds. The ranges of these sounds can be anywhere from a microwave beeping or a fire alarm. This new app, called SoundWatch, was developed by Dhruv Jain, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. He presented his new creation at the virtual ASSETS conference on October 28. This new app could really change many lives for the deaf or hard or hearing.
Many people all around the world are deaf or hard of hearing. In fact, around 466 million people worldwide have disabled hearing, 34 million of these are children. Some people may have been born with hearing problems but most cases are developed through adulthood. 1.1 billion young people, between the ages of 12–35, are at risk of hearing loss due to exposure to noise in a recreational setting. Seniors, especially, may experience hearing loss as the ears age. Unaddressed hearing loss poses an annual global cost of about 750 billion USD. Right now, there is not an affordable and widespread way to treat hearing loss or prevent it. Hearing aids do work for most seniors, but they are extremely expensive to buy. Scientists have been looking for a good way of helping these people for decades, they may just have a way now.
Before Dhruv Jain’s creation, sound awareness apps for smartphones did exist. The problem with those apps was that they could only be used on a phone. Jain, who is hard of hearing, prefers the immediacy of sound notifications on his watch, rather than on his phone. More surveys of people who are deaf or hard of hearing show that Jain isn’t the only one. “On a nature walk, it’ll tell me that there’s birds chirping, or there might be a waterfall nearby,” says Jain. “Those sounds make me feel more present and connected to the world.” Not only is this new app useful for enjoying nature, but it’s also useful for important situations. For example, people who are deaf or hard of hearing can use the SoundWatch app at home to avoid sleeping through a smoke alarm.
The SoundWatch app can be paired with an Android smartwatch and phone. The watch can record nearby noises and it then sends that data to the phone for processing and storing. When the phone finds or detects a sound of interest, the smartwatch will then vibrate and display a notification with the identified sound. Jain and his colleagues designed the app to identify 20 common noises. In test experiments, the app correctly identified all of the sounds 81.2% of the time. The app can also be set to only listen for urgent noises, sounds like a fire alarm, doorbell, or alarm clock. When done so, the app was tested to be about 97.6% accurate. A group of deaf and hard of hearing people around the University of Washington wave already tried the app, and gave it excellent reviews. Users have stated though, that the app sometimes will misclassify some sounds in noisy settings. Right now, Jain and his colleagues are working on a new version of SoundWatch that can better recognize sounds. The new and improved version of the app will even feature new sounds, and allow the user to add their own.
