This Hearing App on Smartwatch Alerts Users With Hearing Loss to Nearby Sounds

Hearing App on Smartwatch :

Smartwatches are starting to aid their users on a whole new level. A new app that notifies the nearby surrounding sounds – SoundWatch. Users with hearing problems can now have this hearing app on smartwatches and be alerted with the sounds around them. The developers of this app stated that this app was created based on their personal experience.

Dhruv Jain, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle said, “The main motivation (to develop this 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” in a report.

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SoundWatch – Hearing app for smartwatches comes extremely handy to notify the users of emergency sounds like fire alarms, car horns, or doorbells.

Dhruv Jain, one of the developers of this hearing app for smartwatch has hearing problems and he personally uses this application when at home to avoid dozing through an unexpected fire alarm or any such emergency scenarios.

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In outdoors, the app notifies the user of the sounds around him/her (like the sound of a waterfall, a dog bark, etc.)

“On a nature walk, it’ll tell me that there are birds chirping, or there might be a waterfall nearby,” he added about his hearing app for smartwatch – Soundwatch.

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The sound alerting apps already exist for smartphones, but the surveys of people with hearing problems and scientists’ rely on instancy of sound identification on his/her wrist, instead of sitting in their pocket propelled them to create this hearing app for a smartwatch.

The app was created by a team at the University of Washington lead by Dhruv Jain. The app can pair with an Android smartwatch and a phone as the smartwatch records the sound and relays the gathered data to the connected smartphone to process.

After detecting the kind of sound, it sends the data back to the smartwatch which then vibrates and displays the info. The app can identify 20 different noises.

According to a report, SoundWatch identified all those sounds 81 percent of the time. Emergency noises like a door knock, fire alarm, or alarm clock were identified with almost 98 percent accuracy.

Deaf people who used this hearing app on the smartwatch for the experiment on the campus were satisfied by its performance, but they also noted that some sounds were misinterpreted in the noisy outdoor settings.

The researchers stated that the app(SoundWatch- hearing app on smartwatch) is still a research prototype and not be relied on in extreme situations yet.

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