Title: An innovative hearing-impaired assistant with sound-localisation and speech-to-text application

Authors: B. Bala Ganesh; B.V. Damodar; R. Dharmesh; K.R. Tharun Karthik; Shriram K. Vasudevan

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita University, Coimbatore, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita University, Coimbatore, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita University, Coimbatore, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita University, Coimbatore, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India ' K. Ramakrishnan College of Technology, Kariyamanikam Road, Samayapuram, Trichy – 621112, India

Abstract: According to the statistics of the World Health Organization (WHO), there are about 466 million people (about 5% of the total population worldwide) who are hearing impaired and 34 million of them are children. It is estimated that by the 2050, there will be almost 900 million people suffering from hearing disability. In India, there are 63 million people with hearing impairment. Hearing aid prices range from ₹20,000 for a basic device to ₹250,000 for a premium hearing aid. People with hearing disability should not have to spend so much money to enable a sense that normal people take for granted. One of the main problems faced by a deaf person is that they find it difficult to have casual conversations because it is hard for them to follow what others are speaking. This can be addressed simply using a mobile application. We present a frugal and affordable system that could show the direction of the speaker along with the speech in text format in real-time. This can be achieved by sound-localisation and speech-to-text conversion. Sound-localisation is a technique used to identify the direction of the source of sound. There are speech-to-text tools that can generate text from speech in real-time.

Keywords: sound-localisation; Android application; simple conversation application; speech-to-text.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMEI.2022.119313

International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, 2022 Vol.14 No.1, pp.63 - 73

Received: 16 May 2020
Accepted: 30 May 2020
Published online: 01 Dec 2021 *

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