In the US, there are 37.6M adults with hearing difficulties, and over 1M are profoundly deaf (i.e., unable to hear speech or participate in a normal conversation). Globally, 360M people have disabling hearing loss. Deafness can be debilitating and greatly affects an individual?s social, educational and occupational prospects. Currently, the major medical treatment for deafness is a cochlear ear implant. This surgical implant procedure is extremely costly ($40,000 to $100,000) and is also ineffective for some deaf people. Certainly, in third-world and developing countries as well as in poorer rural areas of the US, cochlear implants are not a practical option. A need exists for a low-cost device that the deaf can use to understand speech. Fauxsee and its university collaborators propose development of a new technology for bringing speech understanding to the deaf. Our proposed approach uses high-performance speech recognition technology to convert perceived speech into haptic (touch) responses. We utilize the latest in haptic technology embedded in a pair of glasses to provide haptic encodings of the phonemes in perceived speech. We call this new technology RoboHear? because it makes speech recognition possible without requiring an aural pathway for speech processing in the deaf user. RoboHear? device converts speech into haptic sensations. The deaf user then decodes these haptic sensations as individual phonemes and can then understand the speech. RoboHear? device takes advantage of new technology developed for smart cellular phones to provide a method for the deaf to interact with the hearing world. At the completion of the Phase I effort we will have completed the basic hardware and software design of the RoboHear? product. We will conduct initial training using a small group of both hearing and deaf volunteers and evaluate the efficacy to the approach in recognizing speech and encoding the phonemes of that speech as haptic stimuli felt in the stems of a special pair of glasses. We will establish the feasibility of the basic approach in Phase I. In Phase II, we will conduct more extensive formal training in the use of the device and evaluate a larger deaf population in a formal test program. In Phase II, we will also determine how RoboHear? device can be used to teach deaf users to speak using the haptic feedback provided by the haptic devices. RoboHear? device promises to benefit not only the deaf community but also those who suffer from both deafness and blindness. First-generation RoboHear? functions are packaged inside special glasses frames that contain either clear or prescription lenses. We anticipate that the RoboHear? product (when in full production) will sell for less than $2000. This price compares favorably with the cost of conventional hearing aids that are of little use to the profoundly deaf.
Deafness can be debilitating and greatly affects an individual?s social, educational and occupational prospects but for many it is not practical nor affordable to receive cochlear implants. Fauxsee proposes using speech recognition technology to convert speech into haptic (touch) responses embedded in a pair of glasses we call RoboHear? and make speech recognition possible without engaging the ears for speech processing in the deaf user. RoboHear? functions are packaged inside special glasses frames that contain either clear or prescription lenses. In full production the target price for the RoboHear? product is $2000 or less which provides a more affordable hearing alternative to expensive cochlear implants.
