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
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
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
*prototyping testing
