Nearly 13% of the United States population is affected by some type of hearing loss. These disabilities put these individuals at a greater risk in an emergency situation. The majority of fire alarms signal that there is an emergency by sound. The hearing impaired might not realize that there is a fire alarm going off and this puts them in a dangerous situation. Many alarm clocks exist for the hearing impaired but require a whole entire system to be installed.
Design Goal
Our motivation is to ensure the safety of everyone in an emergency situation. Our design goal is to create a device that can operate off of existing fire alarms and does not require a whole new system to be installed. Our device is small and portable. By the help of an Arduino Uno, we want to program a device that can distinguish between normal noise and an alarm. An alarm can be recognized by the duration and loudness of the sound. Once an alarm is distinguished, our device will react and notify the hearing impaired person by means of vibration or a blinking LED light. The focus setting for our prototype is a dorm room, but we hope that this design could be portable and adaptable to fire systems in any public setting.
S.W.O.T
- Strengths:
- Device operates as addition to a pre-existing system
- Our access to resources in order to complete the project
- Weaknesses:
- Team composed of undergraduate students with a limited history of product design
- Device's limited battery life and effective range of alert
- Opportunities
- Growth in public knowledge regarding assistive devices correlates higher demand
- Ranging demographics of people who would benefit from this product
- Threats
- Development of device limited to a 10 week time frame
- Comparative devices exist as competition
Future
We only built a prototype, but we have many more ideas in which our device can expand upon. Our device can have a more attractive looking display. Also, instead of a blinking LED light, our alarm could be anything, such as a vibration mechanism.
