Hearing Aid Gateway for Voice-Controlled Home Automation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Modern hearing assistance devices lack effective methods to convey multiple alerts and messages from various sources to the user, particularly in noisy environments, and struggle to communicate with home appliances, leading to missed important notifications such as alarms or device status updates.
Innovation Solution
A system that includes a gateway device capable of wirelessly communicating with hearing assistance devices, processing and transmitting voice commands and alerts from multiple sources, including home appliances, to ensure the user receives critical information audibly, even when attenuating background audio streams, and allowing voice control of remotely controllable devices.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If hearing assistance device attenuates background audio streams to convey critical alerts, then alert delivery is improved, but user awareness of ambient sound is reduced
Solution Approach 1:
The system uses periodic action by temporarily pausing or reducing the attenuation of background audio streams at specific intervals to allow users to hear ambient sounds. This enables critical alerts to be conveyed through the hearing assistance device while periodically restoring ambient sound awareness, thus resolving the contradiction between reliable alert delivery and maintaining environmental awareness.
2Loss of information
If hearing assistance device communicates with multiple home appliances, then information completeness is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The gateway device serves as an intermediary that centralizes communication between multiple home appliances and the hearing assistance device. Instead of the hearing assistance device directly communicating with each appliance, the gateway consolidates these connections, reducing the complexity at the hearing assistance device while maintaining complete information flow from all appliances.
Solution Approach 2:
The gateway device provides multi-functionality by handling communication with various types of home appliances (ovens, refrigerators, security systems, etc.) through a single interface. This universal approach allows the hearing assistance device to receive information from multiple sources without needing separate communication protocols for each appliance type, thus reducing overall system complexity.
3Ease of operation
If hearing assistance device processes voice commands for device control, then ease of operation is improved, but processing time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system uses preliminary action by pre-processing and recognizing voice commands as they are being spoken, rather than waiting for the complete sentence. The gateway device and hearing assistance device work together to identify intent and initiate appropriate actions during the speech recognition process, significantly reducing the perceived processing time while maintaining hands-free operation capability.
Data Source
AI summary
A system for communication between one or more remotely controllable devices and a hearing assistance device includes a gateway device. The hearing assistance device detects voice commands issued by its wearer. The gateway device wirelessly communicates with the hearing assistance device, produces one or more control signals based on the voice commands, and routes the one or more control signals to one or more devices selected from the one or more remotely controllable devices according to the voice command.