Wearable Vest Helps the Deaf Feel & Understand Speech

Engineering students at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine are developing a vest that allows the profoundly deaf to 'feel' and understand speech. Working under the direction of neuroscientist David Eagleman, director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor and an adjunct assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, the students are refining a vest with dozens of embedded actuators that vibrate in specific patterns to represent words. VEST (Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer) responds to input from a phone or tablet app that isolates speech from ambient sound. The low-cost, noninvasive vest converts the sounds into tactile vibration patterns on the user's torso. Haptic feedback supplants auditory input. The first VEST prototype put together by the team has 24 actuators sewn into the back. A second version, already in production, will include 40 of the actuators.

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] we are a team of six electrical engineering students working on the senior design project it is a device that could potentially allow cly hearing impaired to perceive auditory information through small vibrations on the Torso so we're creating a vest that takes an information from a smartphone the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy

00:00:31 dog and Maps it to patterns of vibrations that u a person with severe hearing impairments could feel and learn to interpret as speech or any other audio the only thing I really care about is how's it uh what's happening right now uh it's um so we working with the Eagleman Lab at the Baylor College of Medicine to do this we're interested in something called sensory substitution

00:00:52 which means the brain doesn't care how it gets information as long as it gets it so we think of visual information going in through the and auditory through the ears but it turns that you can send that kind of data to the brain via other channels so we're working on a project here in the Eagleman laboratory with Scott novich spearheading this for his thesis work and the idea is we're

00:01:16 taking sound information and converting it to patterns of vibration on the Torso so Obby here is wearing this vest that the senior design team has designed and when they're sound in the environment a series of Motors is vibrating which means that he is feeling the sound information as vibrations on his back and the key is that deaf people can come to understand the language of the vest

00:01:45 so by wearing this and practicing and by having these patterns that represent different sounds they can come to hear what's going on they essentially can circumvent a broken auditory system the engineering challenge here is that you have sound which is this very fast one-dimensional time varying signal which is actually too fast for your skin to pick up on in its raw sort of s its

00:02:10 raw sensory state so the name of the game is how can we use math to kind of beat the signal into shape such that The receptors in our skin are able to pick up on all of that needed information so the the basic trick we use is to use signal decompositions to essentially slow the signal down in exchange for increasing the dimensionality which is why we have a grid of little tiny

00:02:33 vibrational um actuators on this thing um and that is sufficient for relaying um enough information in this case for people to understand speech the lab at the Baylor College of Medicine have prototypes already that they using for research and they came to us and uh told and gave us these constraints these engineering constraints uh that could allow with this vest to go into the

00:02:55 market for uh consumers to put on the vest and off the shelf and gain these abilities to perceive new forms of information so uh part of the process of uh the SC design has been to develop a business plan and uh dive into the business side of things learn about how to enter a market do some market analysis um so that has been a great uh learning experience for us as a senior

00:03:21 design team