Sharp-eared glasses let deaf people 'see' sounds

Sharp-eared glasses let deaf people 'see' sounds - tech - 05 September 2012 - New Scientist@import "/css/gridmain.css"; @import "/css/article.css";@import "/css/comlist.css";@import "/data/images/ns/haas/haas.css";/* specific to this article view */#maincol {border-top:solid #A7A7A7 1px; padding-top:15px;}/* Basic commenting CSS*/.combx {margin:10px 0 0 0;padding:10px 20px 10px 10px;}#compnl {border-top:solid #A7A7A7 1px;}/* comment styles for article page only *//* form styles */#comform {margin:20px 50px 20px 10px;}#comform label{width: 90px;text-align: right;}#comform div.userhelp {margin:0 0 2px 115px;}#comform input.textinput, #comform textarea {width:300px;}#comform div.floatclear, #comformlogin div.floatclear {margin-bottom:10px;}#comform input#comcancel{margin:0 10px 0 0;}#comform input#compreview{margin:0 10px 0 0;}#comform textarea {height:95px;}#comformlogin {margin:20px 100px 20px 100px;}#comformlogin label{width: 120px;}#comformlogin input.textinput {width:150px;}#snv_tech a {background: url('/img/bg/snv_tech.jpg') no-repeat; color:#fff;}/* article social media */#sharebtns {width:440px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:20px; padding:15px 0 15px 10px; background:#F2F2F2;}#sharebtns div.floatleft {margin-right:10px;}#sharebtns .stumble {margin-top:1px;}.grpTools img {margin-right:8px; margin-top:9px;}#fblike {margin-top:41px;} Tech    Log inEmailPassword Remember me
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Sharp-eared glasses let deaf people 'see' sounds05 September 2012 byHal HodsonMagazine issue 2880. Subscribe and save IF YOU can hear, you probably take sound for granted. Without thinking, we swing our attention in the direction of a loud or unexpected sound - the honk of a car horn, say. Because deaf people lack access to such potentially life-saving cues, a group of researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon built a pair of glasses which allows the wearer to "see" when a loud sound is made, and gives an indication of where it came from. An array of seven microphones, mounted on the frame of the glasses, pinpoints the location of such sounds and relays that directional information to the wearer through a set of LEDs embedded inside the frame. The glasses will only flash alerts on sounds louder than a threshold level, which is defined by the wearer. Previous attempts at devices which could alert deaf users to surrounding noises have been ungainly. For example, research in 2003 at the University of California, Berkeley, used a computer monitor to provide users with a visual aid to pinpoint the location of a sound. The Korean team have not beaten this problem quite yet - the prototype requires a user to carry a laptop around in a backpack to process the signal. But lead researcher Yang-Hann Kim stresses that the device is a first iteration that will be miniaturised over the next few years. Richard Ladner at the University of Washington in Seattle questions whether the device would prove beneficial enough to gain acceptance. "Does the benefit of wearing such a device outweigh the inconvenience of having extra technology that is seldom needed?" he asks. "No doubt the authors are doing some good engineering, but is what they produced really useful enough to those in the target group?" What's more, there is a risk that the glasses will clash with a US patent application filed by Google earlier this year. The patent, entitled "Displaying sound indications on a wearable computing system", describes a feature for a device similar to the headset of the company's much-anticipated Project Glass initiative. The system flashes visual alerts when it hears sounds that could be important to the wearer. The KAIST team presented its work last week at the InterNoise conference in New York City. Subscribe to New Scientist and you'll get:New Scientist magazine delivered every weekUnlimited access to all New Scientist online content -
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Real-time Closed Captioning InsteadThu Aug 30 17:12:31 BST 2012 by ullrich fischer
Why not include voice recognition software in this device so that there is a continual stream of text in the users field of view showing what recognizable words are audible in the wearer's vicinity? Once the hardware to detect the direction of loud sounds (or maybe even quieter but safety significant sounds like car horns or human screams at a distance) is miniaturized sufficiently to be included in a wearable system, it should be simple enough to include on the fly closed captioning.
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