UbiEar: Bringing location-independent sound awareness to the hard-of-hearing people with smartphones

Non-speech sound-awareness is important to improve the quality of life for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) people. DHH people, especially the young, are not always satisfied with their hearing aids. According to the interviews with 60 young hard-of-hearing students, a ubiquitous sound-awareness t...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: LIU, Sicong, ZHOU, Zimu, DU, Junzhao, SHANGGUAN, Longfei, HAN, Jun, WANG, Xin
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4694
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5697/viewcontent/UbiEar_pv.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Non-speech sound-awareness is important to improve the quality of life for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) people. DHH people, especially the young, are not always satisfied with their hearing aids. According to the interviews with 60 young hard-of-hearing students, a ubiquitous sound-awareness tool for emergency and social events that works in diverse environments is desired. In this paper, we design UbiEar, a smartphone-based acoustic event sensing and notification system. Core techniques in UbiEar are a light-weight deep convolution neural network to enable location-independent acoustic event recognition on commodity smartphons, and a set of mechanisms for prompt and energy-efficient acoustic sensing. We conducted both controlled experiments and user studies with 86 DHH students and showed that UbiEar can assist the young DHH students in awareness of important acoustic events in their daily life.