JAMN Spectacles - INFO 360, Design Thinking Project

School of Informatics, University of Washington, Undergraduate Program

Design Question:

How can we design a speech-to-text mobile device for deaf people to help them understand their surroundings and communicate more effectively with those around them?

My Role:

Project Manager & Designer
My main contribution was writing the design specification.

Goals:

• Provide captioning for conversations in line of sight
• Minimize interruption during conversations
• Captioning to occur in real-time and provide the user with speech-to-text visualization
• The device with the application must be mobile or created with something that is currently commercially available
• The sound capturing capabilities of the application are limited to current directional microphone capabilities (it is probably not possible to hear a person that is 100 feet away in a loud crowd)
• Provide captions for multiple languages
• Create an affordable product
• Create a device that does not assume the user can read lips

Process:

Solution:

Our final solution is a pair of glasses that not only converts speech to text and displays it on the lens, but also alerts the user of notable sounds in the area. These sounds include sirens, the user's name, construction, etc. that we found was important to our user based on research we conducted. We also designed a website for user's to specify preferences and improve the speech-to-text technology. View all functionality in the design spec here - <link>