The increasing prevalence of smart phone and tablet technology has stimulated a thriving sector of software development. Several health-related applications have been developed to aid consumers with a variety of conditions, from obesity to mental health. Hearing-impaired individuals may also benefit from this new technology, as the auditory sensors embedded in these products provide a reliable mechanism to receive vital auditory information. Currently, there is no application designed to assist hearing-impaired individuals in emergency situations, where the recognition of key sounds can be crucial. This technology is a smartphone application that continuously operates to identify important sounds, such as a fire alarm, and alerts the user when appropriate.
Although the currently available consumer devices provide tremendous opportunity for auditory assistance, the number of applications targeting hearing impairment is relatively small. While current applications identify the presence of very loud sounds, they cannot classify or identify the origin. This technology uses advanced classification algorithms, including mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, hidden Markov models, and support vector machines, to recognize specific sounds even within noisy environments. Haptic feedback to the user can then be modified based on the specific event that is occurring. Furthermore, unlike existing software, this application can automatically identify key sounds from a pre-existing library without requiring user input.
Patent Pending (US 20130070928)
Tech Ventures Reference: IR CU12023