vibe haptic jacket

Robotics & Technology Use Project

 

+ Haptic jacket that complements wearers with vibrational tones to enhance how the deaf community feel music & sound.

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2018

by creating a  casual wearable jacket that gives visual stimulation and tactile feedback, the user can spend less time paying attention to the environment and more time doing what matters. 

sensory substitution example – teeth

*research insights

deaf community

+ The deaf community is made up of various groups of people who have wide range of residual hearing.

residual hearing

+ Residual hearing means that those impacted can't hear sounds of a certain frequency that are below a certain volume.

cochlear implants

+ With 50 million people worldwide having deafness, the currently available solution is the cochlear implant. 

 

+ The challenge is that it requires an invasive surgery and can be very expensive, and it doesn't work on everyone.

sensory substitution example – teeth

*absence/presence

125hz

1000hz

8000hz

audio spectrum

+ can sensory data be inputed through different sensory channels? 

range of frequencies

+ 125hz – bass & drums

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+ 1000hz – horns & vocals

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+ 8000hz – harmonics

*please lower your audio volume before playing.

example: sine waves

source: Vox & David Eagleman

+ and can the brain learn to figure out the meaning of such information channels?

sensory substitution

+ Our brains do not know or care where the incoming data is coming from. in theory, this allows information from one sense to be fed into another sense. 

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expanding our senses

+ VIBE is about building a wearable, casual, smart jacket that communicates sound to the brain using the sense of touch. The prototype shows this will be powerful enough to give deaf individuals a new "sense" of hearing.

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+ The research data shows that in order to interpret audio, it would take around 2-3 weeks long for someone to wear VIBE to be able to understand something.

*ideations

1/5

arduino/adafruit

+ By using a microphone chip, set of vibration motors, LEDs and a little coding magic, the prototype was able to feed external sounds into real-time visuals & vibrations

1/3

*prototyping testing

VIBE

©2020