Empowering the Deaf - The pitch

Life is hard for the severely hearing impaired. They cannot easily communicate with people around them. With the Empowering the Deaf system, the barrier simply vanishes. The signing is turned into speech projected by the smart phone and speech from the other person is converted into text viewed on Google glass. The result a truly seamless communication experience.

Empowering the Deaf - The fun part

This is a great project for combining software and hardware skills. Getting everything integrated into a product that the user doesn’t even notice is the end goal. There are many ways to increase the usefulness of the product, including better speech recognition and sign recognitionas well as better synthetic voices, to name a few.

Empowering the Deaf - The growth potential

There are roughly one million Americans who are functionally deaf.  If half of them bought a unit, and upgraded every 5 years that would be 100,000 sales per year or $50 million in profit.

Empowering the Deaf - The monetization

The hardware alone for this product will run in the $3,000+ range. I expect that a total package would sell for $5,000, with a $500 profit per sale.

Empowering the Deaf - The idea

The goal of Empowering the Deaf is to leverage technology to break down the barriers between the deaf and non-deaf as well as improve safety through situational awareness.

Communicating with the severely hearing impaired usually requires both parties to use sign language. Usually the hearing impaired person will know how to sign, but that skill is rare in the general population. The solution is to have each party communicate in the way that is most natural for them. This requires real-time speech recognition technology and a way for the hearing impaired person to see the text, something Google Glass would be great for.  This wouldn’t necessarily be as hard as it sounds. What is required is a lapel mic that can pick up the other person’s speech, a smartphone with the speech recognition software, and a bluetooth connection between the smartphone and glass to show the text.

Now, let’s cover how the hearing impaired person will communicate with the other person. Again, another budding technology will play a key role, this time it’s Leap Motion. Next to the lapel mic on the hearing impaired person’s chest will be a Leap Motion sensor. This sensor is designed to accurately measure hand and finger movements in 3 dimensions, which is perfect for translating sign language into speech. The user’s smartphone will again play the intermediary between the sensor and the output, which this time would be a speaker that will say what the person is signing.

I think the above is enough to have a ground breaking product, but I think it could do more. Everyday we use hearing for more than just listening to people, we also use it to navigate our environment. If the hearing impaired user had not just one mic on them, but several, they could be used to signal to the user what sounds are around them and the direction they’re coming from. It could be very valuable to know that there is a car sound to the left and another car sound behind the user. Knowing what’s going on around the user could not only increase their safety but also their general quality of life.

Empowering the Deaf - The motivation

Losing a sense can be debilitating. For example, being deaf make communicating with most hearing people around you very difficult. It can also make navigating urban environments extra dangerous, i.e., not hearing aproaching cars and other motor vehicles.