2023 Galleries
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Galleries // 2023 Spark:Spring Student // Felt
Felt
Winner - Gold
Competition: Spark:Spring Student
Designer: Jessica Kwon
Design Type: Product & industrial
Company / Organization / School: Harvard University
Team Members: Jessica Kwon, Alexandra Weiner, Julius Stein & Priyanka Pillai
There are over 15 million people in the world who have severe deafblindness. Most of these people have to rely on human translators to communicate. Even with a speech-to-braille reader, people with deafblindness often feel left out when they cannot understand the subtext, or underlying emotion, of a conversation or social setting. Through thorough research and testing, our team designed a three part system called Felt that allows the wearer to understand the three components of conversation: presence, text, and subtext. The armband would give haptic feedback to the wearer's forearm on the different emotions of the conversation. The detachable braille reader on top of the sleeve would be a speech-to-braille reader to convey the text of the conversation. The pin, worn on the wearer's chest and equipped with a camera and microphone, would detect emotion using computer vision and machine learning, as well as collect speech for the braille reader.
JUDGES COMMENTS:
Refreshing concept that enriches communication for the deaf blind. ,,Very rarely is a solution designed to nurture experience beyond utilty for this user so this is an innovative solution to a significant but rarely considered challenge