As deaf people are unable to hear critical warning sounds like alarms and sirens, their safety is at risk always. Keeping all this in mind, Grey Group Singapore wanted RedBytes to develop an app targeting the safety of deaf people.

The Hearing Aide app was shortlisted for Lions Health Awards in June 2015. Lions Health Award is one of the largest healthcare communications awards in the world. The judgement of all the entries of Lions Health takes place in Cannes and will be awarded in every June.

Vision behind Hearing Aide:

The Singapore Association of the Deaf wanted to implement a technological solution for the deaf people to make their life easier and safer. In these days, most of the deaf people carry smart phones with them all the time. So, one of the good ways to make them safer is to transform their smart phone into a warning device. Keeping this objective in mind, Redbytes developed an app which makes use of the sound capturing feature of the smart phones and turned it into a warning device for the Deaf community.

What is Hearing Aide and how it works:

Hearing Aide is a sound recognition app designed especially for the deaf. It works by recognizing the sounds around a user and alerts them through flashing lights, push messages and vibrations. The app comes preloaded with alerts for sounds like sirens, bells, alarms, beeps, bells and rings. This app also gives the facility to user to customize their own alerts by recording and storing sounds that they want to be alerted about. For that, these guidelines should be followed:

• The sound recorded should not be in a noisy environment which makes it difficult to capture/recognize.
• The minimum length of the sound to be recorded should be 10 seconds.
• The nature of recording sound should be repetitive.
• The app supports up to a maximum of 10 sounds.

 

Some of the customized alerts users made were for baby’s crying, thunder storm, whistle sounds etc.