Sharp-eared glasses let deaf people 'see' sounds

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.

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