People with hearing loss often miss critical, unpredictable sounds at home (like alarms or accidents), which can directly affect their safety and independence. This project explores how sound can be translated into intuitive light and vibration cues so that users know when “something is happening” around them, not only during planned or routine events.

Why?

The project took place in a short, structured engineering design course with mixed teams of engineering and industrial design students. Within this context, I often acted as a bridge between disciplines: translating user needs into technical requirements, aligning CAD form and electronics layout, and helping the team converge on an indoor, proof-of-concept device that detects sound presence, loudness, and direction and communicates this through an LED matrix and haptic feedback.

Scope

We followed a step-by-step design process: defining the design question, generating concepts, creating a preliminary design, detailing the technical solution, realizing a working prototype, testing, and evaluating. My role centered on 3D CAD modeling, sketching the product form, and contributing to user research around daily home scenarios of people with auditory impairment.

Approach

Evaluations with scenario-based testing showed that users could quickly understand where a sound was coming from and recognized the potential of the device to increase awareness of unexpected events in the home, while also highlighting future needs for refinement in comfort, wearing style, and false-positive handling.

Results