Daily Archives: September 26, 2008

Patent: Portable Deaf Strobe / Vibration Personal Audio Triggered Deaf Notification Device

Sometimes I come up with an idea that I want to patent but I am so busy that I just blog it instead. Hopefully this will make it into the Internet Archive and folks can send me money when they want to license my invention.
This idea is pretty simple and my patent search (2 minutes on Google) suggests that while there are similar products, I cannot find this exact product.
The idea is to make a strobe light / vibrating system to alert deaf people when there is a particular noise from a set of noises in the room.
There are many similar products:
http://www.harriscomm.com/catalog/default.php?cPath=1215
It looks like you can nicely outfit a house for a deaf person to detect all kinds of things and signal them – even when a baby cries. But the products described above are not portable – they cannot be taken while traveling.
So my idea is a portable, self contained deaf alert system that “listens” actively for certain noises, loud speech, door knocks, crashing sounds, phone rings, etc.. It would even have a silent mode where pretty much any noise would trigger it – so while you were sleeping you could even notice a dor opening or closing.
You could even build a motion detector into the gadget to flash on motion.
The device could record audio to internal flash memory (probably only record when there is sound) – so that if something did happen – the audio could be downloaded and checked by someone who could hear. With compression and only recording when there are noises – several days would likely fit on 4GB of flash – of course there would be privacy issues with constantly recording stuff – perhaps the data could be encrypted – so special software would be needed to decrypt the audio. Maybe the audio files would need to be taken/sent/uploaded somewhere for analysis.
It might even be a good idea for non-deaf people to have such a thing – it would make them feel safer in their room while traveling.
Of course there would be some technical issues to train the gadget about which sounds to listen for – but I am betting this would yield nicely with the application of Genetic Algorithms and/or Bayesian techniques.
The gadget would need a pretty sophisticated configuration capability (although simple versions could be produced). They would likely need a USB connection to a PC for precise configuration and firmware upgrades. It would all a service technician to configure the system precisely for a less technically sophisticated device owner.
Building a prototype could be pretty easy – you just need a basic computer system with a sound digitizer and a light – frankly a One Laptop Per Child system could be used as a prototype. Perhaps some clever UM Engineering students could take this on as their project – I bet a prototype could be done in 15 weeks as long as sleep was not so important…