Today, the number of hearing impaired people living in our country is estimated to be over 3 million. Some of these people are born this way, some of them become hearing impaired after an accident or a disease. Our project aims to help them and ease their life. With our project, they will notice the doorbell even in their sleeps thanks to the IoT environment. That feature will help them about living alone.
Vear is a Java based project running on the Android platform. Also, it will use a server to collect voice records coming from users and compare them to decide future environmental voices. There will be an effective internet of things environment such as sound sensors to catch environmental voices like doorbell or a crying baby and a smart LED plug-in to notify the user visually when something concerning him/her happens. Our project will also help hearing impaired people at the outside of their homes by alerting them about their surrounding sounds and informing them in several ways such as the source, direction or distance of sounds. All in all, this project will help the hearing-impaired people with their social life and it will make living easier for them. In this scope, Vear provides a better standard to its users.
Vear’s purpose is, as its name states, becoming a virtual ear. People who have hearing disabilities are the potential users of our application. There are two main features that we are aiming to have on Vear. The first feature will be available on home environment and we can describe it as: hearing desired sounds, and according to these hearings, taking desired actions. The second feature, will be used at the outside of the home environment, and it’s aim to detect sounds from users’ surroundings and alert them if it is necessary.
Vear is different from existing applications in different ways. To understand it better we can examine the instant messaging applications developed for the hearing-impaired people enabling them to send each other messages by changing the text with sign language. But Vear differ from its competitors by changing the communication channel.
Our project will notify the hearing-impaired people visually by smart LED’s and by vibration of smart phones. Also, it will record and label voices whenever user wishes. Later those recorded voices will be used to try to recognize other voices from the environment. This way Vear tries to make easier to live alone and make them sufficient for hearing impaired people themselves.