Smart Glasses Audio Processing for Hearing Impaired Users
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Solution Overview
Problem
Individuals with profound or total hearing loss face challenges in communication due to difficulty in hearing spoken words, especially in noisy environments, and often struggle to gauge their own voice volume, leading to misunderstandings and social interactions being hindered.
Innovation Solution
Eyeglasses with a directional microphone array, user microphone array, and a display system that includes a processor to receive audio signals, recognize speech, and provide closed captioning, translation, and volume feedback, enabling users to better understand conversations and manage their voice levels.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional hearing aids or cochlear implants are used, then some hearing assistance is provided, but they do not provide sufficient help in noisy environments or for understanding direction of speech
Solution Approach 1:
The hearing system is segmented into multiple directional microphone arrays positioned at different locations (ears, temples, bridge) to capture sound from different directions. This segmentation allows the system to process spatial audio information and provide directional speech understanding that single-ear devices cannot achieve.
Solution Approach 2:
Multiple microphone arrays from different locations are merged and processed together by the processor to create a comprehensive spatial audio understanding. The combination of signals from bilateral microphones enables the system to determine speaker direction and filter noise more effectively than isolated hearing aids.
2Adaptability or versatility
If closed captioning and translation features are added to glasses, then communication accessibility is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The glasses are designed as a universal platform that performs multiple functions: directional speech capture, closed captioning, real-time translation, and volume monitoring. By integrating these diverse functions into a single device, the system provides comprehensive communication accessibility without requiring multiple separate devices.
Solution Approach 2:
The processor acts as an intermediary that receives raw audio signals from multiple microphone arrays, processes them through speech recognition and translation algorithms, and outputs processed information to the display. This intermediary processing layer manages the complexity by organizing the flow between sensors and output devices.
3Ease of operation
If user volume monitoring is implemented, then users with hearing loss can better control their speech volume, but additional hardware and processing are required
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements feedback by monitoring the user's speech volume through dedicated microphones and displaying real-time volume information on the lens display. This feedback loop allows users with hearing loss to see how loudly they are speaking and adjust accordingly, creating a closed-loop control system for volume management.
Data Source
AI summary
The glasses with display may include a bridge, two temples hingedly coupled to the bridge, and a directional microphone array, the directional microphone array including two or more microphones positioned on the bridge or the temples. The glasses with display may also include a user microphone array, the user microphone array including one or more microphones positioned on the temples and oriented toward the mouth of a user wearing the glasses with display or one or more bone conduction microphones. In addition, the glasses with display include two lenses positioned in the bridge, at least one of the lenses including a display, the display visible by the user, the display including one or more of a directional display, closed caption display, and user volume display. The glasses with display additionally include a processor adapted to receive audio signals from the directional microphone array and the user microphone array, or from a separate mobile device, the processor adapted to control the display.