Imagine...
Imagine that you're crossing a busy intersection, and a car honks at you. You've had a cochlear implant and can hear the sound of the horn, but you can't tell which of the cars it's coming from. What do you do?
Imagine that your baby is crying somewhere in the house. You're deaf and you can't hear the cry. How can you help your baby?
Imagine that your grandson is calling you on the phone, and you've left the phone in some obscure location. You're deaf in one ear and thusly can't determine the direction of the sound. How are you going to find the phone?
...A solution:
That's my project. A solution for people who can't determine the direction of sound, or can't hear it altogether.
I have designed a device that translates sound into vibration, which (almost) anyone can feel. It's meant to be worn on hands, in the form of a glove, or wristband. Miniature directional microphones are attached to the glove, and wired up to a nearby motor (also attached to the glove). This allows the wearer to "feel" the direction of sound, and it's approximate volume.
The idea came to me when reading a book called by Dr. Norman Doidge; The Brain that Changes Itself. The book is written on a subject called "neuroplasticity". The idea behind neuroplasticity is that brains can change the way that they work, contrary to the previous popular belief (and still quite popular too) that the brain is an extremely complicated machine that learns but doesn't change its wiring. Neuroplasticity means that a brain can adapt to new inputs, or '8th senses.'
I wondered whether the brain could learn to 'hear' by feeling vibrations. At first I thought that this would just help deaf people to notice a loud ruckus. I realized that this could be expanded to people who can't pinpoint sound, when I read Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, by Valentino Braitenberg. Vehicles describes robots that can determine the direction of sound and other stimuli, by using two sensors, and 'comparing' the inputs.
I figured that the same principle could be used for my project. Two gloves would be needed to compare information, where the one that vibrates more would be closer to the sound. This is the way that human ears can determine the direction of sound.
Over a series of engineering feats, I wrote a program that allowed me to take in inputs from a trusty 'A2D' analogue to digital converter, callibrate, and analyze them, before it outputs the data. I used Visual Basic 6.0 to write the program. I then wired this up to a motor and microphone. This is easier said than done; my catastrophic failures are logged in my Journal. My analysis and conclusion are logged in my Experiments Page.
My project has three components: Research, Engineering, and Experimenting. Here is a helpful video.