The development of an emergency vehicle alert system for hearing impaired drivers is proposed. This system will display a visual warning signal for hearing impaired or deaf drivers if an emergency vehicle is approaching the driver. Through the display the driver can quickly determine the distance and direction of the approaching emergency vehicle. The Phase I objective was achieved by verifying the feasibility of the proposed acoustic alert system concept. In Phase II, prototypes will be built and field tests will be conducted to determine the practical variability of the alert system. This system will consist of microphones, signal processor, and display. Several products for the same purpose are currently or were previously marketed. These devices use banks of filters and level detection and they provide only a simple warning sign. False detection rates of these devices is very high and the performance of these devices is far from satisfactory. The key goal addressed by this project is to drastically increase the accuracy and reliability of such systems while maintaining low cost. Recent strides in signal processing in the performance of low cost microprocessors makes this goal practical.
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