Digital Ear

All senses and abilities of human beings are essential for us and the blessing of Allah almighty. Likewise, the sense of hearing is equally important as other senses. What happens to a person who is born deaf or lost his hearing due to age or other physical disease or accident. They will not be able

Project Title

Digital Ear

Project Area of Specialization

Software Engineering

Project Summary

Introduction

All senses and abilities of human beings are essential for us and the blessing of Allah almighty. Likewise, the sense of hearing is equally important as other senses. What happens to a person who is born deaf or lost his hearing due to age or other physical disease or accident. They will not be able to listen or hear sounds and noises or voices in their surroundings.

Not all sounds are clear and noiseless, to detect a clear sound, the device will use a noise cancellation program to cancel out the noise which is not needed or has no meaning. It would be impossible to detect the meaningful sound to give an alert.

The Digital ear device is a voice recognition device that alerts or tells its user about the type of sound detected using different vibrations variations solely for the people challenged with profound deafness to help them respond to voices and sounds they might not hear with a hearing disability in public or family or house. The device doesn’t replace sign language but assists deaf people in different tasks. The wrist wearable device works as an alternative to the hearing ability of a person to hear horns, sirens, azans, doorbells, names, etc. The devices vibrate with different and unique vibration variations upon detection of real-time voice or sound recognition or detection which helps him get alert and differentiate between different vibrations for a different type of voice detected like different ringtones in mobile for different contacts.

The Digital Ear project consists of a mobile application (Android/IOS) with the Raspberry pi chip to register the name of the user and essential information for the device to work for that individual.

Problem Statement

The problems of people with profound deafness are other people cannot interact with deaf people, which might be the cause of their low social involvement in society. They cannot hear essential sounds to work in daily life like horns, doorbells, azan, people calling their names, etc. which is very depressing for a deaf person. So, these problems are the major focus of our project to minimize this distance of the deaf person from his/her family and society, and at the workplace, they are unable to know who’s calling them, they are dependent on touch.

When it’s a dimly lit room or a noisy dark club, the absence of light makes it difficult for the hearing impaired to engage with others. They generally rely on visual stimuli, such as lip-reading or sign language, so darkness poses a challenge.

The mental health of the person who doesn’t get attention from friends and family is disturbed because nobody wants to put extra effort to talk to them when they are unable to know that somebody is calling their names. Our project will help them and the people around them to communicate with ease.

Project Objectives

Objectives

• To provide a cheap but accurate working device to people with profound deafness for use in real-life situations with Real-time sound recognition.
• To know about around them without anyone’s help.
• To let deaf people can hear different sounds (Doorbells, Horns, Names, etc.)

Project Implementation Method

Implementation

We have found the three best voice recognition software in which two software requires internet for their working and one was offline.

• Jasper

• Raspberry Pi Voice Recognition by Oscar Liang
• Raspberry Pi Voice Control by Steven Hickson

The first one by Jasper was offline, but the problem is it is less efficient in terms of accuracy and speed, and it requires at least 8 GB of memory card attached to the pi.

The other two that require internet by Oscar Liang and Steven Hickson, are most precise and accurate. Both use Google text to speech APIs.

We will use voice recognition by steven Hickson because it is simple and easy to use.

The recognition software that will be used for this project uses Google Voice and Speech APIs. The flow of working is such that it captures audio by using the microphone and then this analog signal will be converted into a digital signal by raspberry pi and this digital signal will be converted into text by using Google voice APIs. This text will be compared to our stored database, if both texts match the function that includes the code for turning on the vibrator, will be executed.

Technologies

• Linux Operating system

• Python Language

• Voice Recognition Software for Raspberry Pi
• Google voice and speech APIs
• Python Speech Recognition packages
• Python Noise reduction packages
• Python Audio packages

Benefits of the Project

Our project is especially for patients having profound deafness. The device ‘Digital Ear’ will help the patient to be aware of his/her surroundings by using his/her sense of feeling through vibrations. It will help them to listen when someone calls their names. The device will notify the patient when it detects the vehicle’s horn within a specific radius around him and the intensity of vibration will increase with the decrease of distance between the patient and the horn. In this way, they can also get to know that the distance is far or near. Moreover, our device will detect the azan and vibrate so that patient could get to know about it and it will also vibrate when someone rings the patient’s doorbell. Each feature has different types of vibrations so that the patient can distinguish between the type of alarm.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

The Final deliverable will wrist wearable device that include followings:

• Raspberry Pi 4
• Vibration Motors
• Rechargeable Battery Cells
• Microphone
• Generic jumper cables

Raspberry Pi 4

We will use raspberry pi 4 with a built-in Linux operating system for the execution of our python code. This version of raspberry pi has built-in WIFI and Bluetooth module having 4 GB RAM. This model consists of an extra fast and efficient processor with four USB ports, two USB 3.0, and two USB 2.0 ports. It has two micro-HDMI ports and a USB Type-C power supply port. The Internet can be connected either by WIFI or by Ethernet port.

Vibrator

This little vibrator is very efficient and alarming for non-audible notifications and this is perfect for projects that require haptic alarms. This vibrator has tiny discs that are properly sealed, and they can easily be embedded with raspberry pi.

Microphone

As raspberry pi does not have a sound card that’s why we can’t connect any microphone through an audio jack. So, I am using a mic that can be connected through USB port 2.0 or 3.0 or both.  It is very small in size and reliable for this project. In the given figures you can easily see its size.

Generic Jumper Cable

Generic jumper wires or jumper cables will be used as a connector in case some other noise cancellation module or audio convertor module will be used for testing purposes. These are 30 cm long and have connector pins on both ends.

Rechargeable Battery Cells

hese kinds of the chargeable cell will be used as a battery to provide power to raspberry pi.

 

 

 

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

Medical

Other Industries

IT , Others , Health

Core Technology

Artificial Intelligence(AI)

Other Technologies

Wearables and Implantables

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People, Reduced Inequality

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com