Introduction

It is projected that by the year 2050 there will be over seven hundred million people that will have hearing loss. With that being taken into account, there will be a need for innovations to further aid those who are deaf and or have hearing loss. There are many out in the market currently that exist; all differing from one another offering assistance in either enabling phone calls with captions or having the smart device pick up a person’s voice in person and transcribe it to text. These services already exist and are known as the Roger App (calls with captions) and Google Live Transcribe which is the app that is referenced in the second example.  The Roger app is efficient based on the site’s pricing, it has three different memberships, two of which are monthly subscriptions. While the Google Live Transcribe application takes speech that is picked up by the microphone and then put into captions for the user to read within their smart device. What distinguishes Google’s app from the Roger app is that the Google app is free of charge to its users, and who does not like free stuff! Both of these applications take the problem and make a vital solution that helps those with hearing loss. However, we will target a different area in which we will help those listen to music more clearly. Our team has come up with a brilliant idea that helps those that suffer from hearing loss and that are deaf have a better experience when listening to their favorite music, our app will be called Freqz.

            Our innovations aim to better our biggest competitor which is the Roger app, which already provides speech to text translation for zoom calls and other types of calls. By recognizing that the Roger app is our biggest competition we also recognize that we need something that they do not yet have. We taught ourselves what is something that we enjoy that those people that are deaf cannot enjoy? We came up with the answer: music. We researched and found that deaf people do not listen to music but feel the music and can enjoy music just as we can. Capturing music wave sounds and turning them into vibrations is one way in which we can make our innovations that our competitors and since we plan on turning sounds into vibrations we also plan on making it so that individuals can make their vibration music. One deficiency that our competitor has is that it is not free, we as a team recognize that deaf is a disability and that they should experience the things, normal humans, experience and therefore we plan on making our app completely free, we also wanna take it a step further and make it so that you can feel and make music without wifi capability allowing those individuals who cannot afford wifi an opportunity to feel the music.

Figure 1. How sound waves make their way into Ear drums.

Process of Innovation

For our innovation, we will engineer it ourselves through programming. We will first start with a speech-to-text conversion for the main attention-grabbing feature of this app. Getting this to work well is crucial for those individuals who wish to use the app to communicate with their friends via the internet. Then our next step is to look into sound vibration and how we can program a phone to vibrate for a certain time mimicking a beat of the song. This feature is very important because we need vibration to match certain songs so that deaf people can enjoy their music and finally the opportunity for deaf people to create their music by using vibration so that others can feel it across the app. This project will require many different items. We will need a computer for programming, a piano, or other instruments so that we can capture their vibration and try to match it, and put it onto our app. One important thing we need is a deaf tester and we plan on releasing the app to popular deaf dancers in hopes to gain popularity and grow our community. Since we are planning on designing this app ourselves we will not be using a big budget, we estimate that we will need a budget for renting and advertisement and roughly estimate around twenty thousand dollars. Our innovation is estimated to take around one year because we need to make sure that calibrations of vibrations and speech to text will take a while to adjust perfectly and therefore we expect to take a year. We are trying to implement and design this app to help deaf people. The method of the app will be to upload to all IOS, Android, and Microsoft platforms. To be known and to test our application, we plan to give a free month trial, so that they know and become familiar with the app. After the month, we will charge a subscription of five dollars a month to get the premium version. This version is that the app will be able to be used offline and you will delete the ads from the app. We are not going to use materials but work tools because everything is digital, such as the software to program the app. The name of the software is Appcelerator Titanium and it is an ideal software for developing mobile apps similar to those native to mobile operating systems. It uses JavaScript and is responsible for automatically translating the programming to the rest of the systems. In addition, it is very simple and it is not necessary to be a programming expert to master it, since it’s a very intuitive interface.

Concluding everything, we plan on creating an app that will help deaf and hearing loss problems to feel the music by converting the beats of the music into vibrations. We will bring solutions to this problem through the use of the programming languages that will help to create an app. Moreover, It will be more convenient and affordable to be used by the user because they will get access to better services like no ads and can be used without wifi. Lastly, the innovation that we will create will bring a change in people’s lives. Millions of people with listening problems can use this app. It can help them to escape from the pain of life and help them to reduce their stress.

Self-Reflection

I was excited to do this work, especially because it was a team-work. I really love this kind of projects because I learn so much of my teammates. Everyone has a different way to think so we discuss ways to do it, and I really get a good knowledge of the conversations or the points of view of each one. I think we did a really good job, everyone cooperate in every part. If someone was struggling with his part, we just meeting up to discussed and give some ideas to realize the problem. It was not difficult but we research a lot for out topic. We have to know if there are common apps, or if even exist. I think we develop a good proposal because it’s for a good common, to help deaf people or people with different disabilities. I really enjoyed doing research like this in the field of engineering, which as you know is a branch that never stops that always advances with the rhythm of modern technology, it encourages me to always be reading scientific journals where there is always news from those that one day I would like to participate in them, for and with society. I feel comfortable doing this team-work since I like to do research work, in this way I enrich my knowledge, expand my vocabulary and I am open to talk about more topics.

In short, I liked it very much and I felt very good to learn about this, it helps me as a professional to have a better recognition, so that I am not just another researcher, but a great researcher and professional.

In the future I hope to do more team-work like this to be able to enrich my knowledge and little by little understand the importance of research.

And I hope that other people understand and understand the importance of research in science, engineering or medicine, in any branch, as I learned with this work.

Reference

            “Deafness and Hearing Loss.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/deafness-and-hearing-loss.

“How Does Sound Travel from One Medium to Another?” Science ABC, 13 Nov. 2021, https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-sciences/movement-of-sound-waves-through-different-media.html.

            “5 Must-Have Apps for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People in 2020.” Inclusive City Maker, 26 Oct. 2021, https://www.inclusivecitymaker.com/smartphone-apps-deaf-people-2020/.