Tactile Hearing Aid

The hearing impaired face specific challenges in their daily routines; with the loss of hearing, an individual becomes heavily dependent upon visual aids that do not always offer the best solution. At times, the inability to detect the presence of sound can be hazardous to an individual's safety. The goal of our project is to introduce a device that will improve the standard of living for a hearing impaired individual and does not interfere with visual aids such as lip-reading. The proposed design separates sound into frequency components and utilizes vibrotactile transducers to transmit sound information to the skin. With regular use, the user would ideally be able to recognize the sensations produced by different frequencies and associate them with the corresponding sound stimulus.