ear Inc: George Tsai, MinHong Zhou, Rick Liu, Daniel Tang, Aaron Lee School of Engineering Science Simon Fraser University

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1 . ear Inc. Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6 Proposal for ear Submitted by Contact Submitted to ear Inc: George Tsai, MinHong Zhou, Rick Liu, Daniel Tang, Aaron Lee George Tsai School of Engineering Science Simon Fraser University Andrew Rawicz School of Engineering Science Simon Fraser University Steve Whitmore School of Engineering Science Simon Fraser University Date January 14, 1999

2 . ear Inc. Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6 February 23, 1999 Dr. Andrew Rawicz School of Engineering Science Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6 Dear Dr. Rawicz: The attached document is a proposal for an assistive device for the hearing impaired. This project is to design a pager that uses vibration to notify hearing impaired people in cases of doorbell ring, incoming phone calls or even in case of fire or toxic gas. To provide a clear overview of our project, the contents of the proposal consists an introduction of the ear project, an outline of design specification, the sources and information of project funding, and of course details on project schedule and team structure of ear Inc. ear Inc. is a team of five creative, motivated, gregarious, versatile SFU engineering students. They are George Tsai; Minhong Zhou; Rick Liu; Daniel Tang; Aaron Lee. Regarding to any questions or concerns about our project, please contact me by phone at or by at ctsaia@sfu.ca. Sincerely, George Tsai CEO of ear Inc

3 1 Executive Summary Hearing-impaired or deaf people often have to face unnecessary challenges in daily life. Their disabilities prevent them from responding to some of the incidents occurring around them, such as the doorbell ring, telephone ring or smoke alarm. These difficulties severely handicapped hearing impaired people s ability to communicate with their surrounding environment. Many devices have been invented to help people with hearing disability. Often lights are installed on the ceiling or along with the telephone and the smoke detector. When these devices are activated, the lights will flash to get people s attention. However, there are often situations where this approach is inconvenient or not effective at all. What happens if the deaf person is sleeping? What if he lives in a big house with lots of rooms? What if it is a bright sunny summer day and all the windows are open? Obviously, there are a lot of downsides for these light-oriented solutions. Our company is proposing to develop a device, called ear (electronic ear), that will overcome those disadvantages and at the same time, provide more convenience and affordability to a hearing impaired user. This device will consist of a receiver that will vibrate whenever it receives a signal, and a transmitter that will send the signal when it is activated by an external device such as a doorbell or telephone. The receiver will also have a LCD display to inform user the source of the signal. With the help from this device, a person can move around freely in the house and concentrate on his work without worrying about missing any of the signals. ear Inc. consists of five senior engineering students with experiences in programming, signal processing and circuit design. Our budget is estimated to be $530, and we will try to get financial support from several funding organizations. The project is scheduled to be completed in twelve weeks. 1

4 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY... 1 INTRODUCTION... 4 SYSTEM OVERVIEW... 5 SIGHT... 6 TOUCH (1)... 6 TOUCH (2)... 6 PROPOSED DESIGN SOLUTION... 6 COMPETITION... 7 ADA ENTERPRISES INC... 7 PHONEMAC CO... 7 NEW ENGLAND ASSISTANCE DOG SERVICE... 7 DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS... 8 POWER INPUT... 8 DEVICE INPUT... 8 DEVICE OUTPUT... 8 PRELIMINARY BUDGET... 9 FUNDING... 9 SCHEDULE TEAM ORGANIZATION CONCLUSION

5 3 LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1 SYSTEM OVERVIEW... 5 FIGURE 2 SYSTEM BLOCK DIAGRAM... 5 FIGURE 3 GANTT CHART FIGURE 4 MILESTONE CHART LIST OF TABLES TABLE 1 PRELIMINARY BUDGET ESTIMATION

6 4 Introduction In 1991, 5.5% of the total Canadian population are hearing impaired 1. They can not have the luxury of using things that most people take for granted. For instance, if you have a smoke detector installed, you will know when the alarm goes off. However, for those hearing-impaired people, they do not know when the disaster strikes. This could be applied to carbon monoxide detector as well. Another instance, one way of telling people if they have guests at their door is to listen to the chimes of the door bell, but for those hearing-impaired people, one way is to look at a special light (light goes on when door bell is pressed) installed above the door. What if they have diverted their attention away from the light, e.g. watching TV? The guests would be left waiting outside. The list of examples can go on and on. The point that we are raising here is that although there are devices designed for the hearing-impaired, but they are not practical. That causes not only inconveniences but also possible danger to their lives. The objective of our project is to develop a pager that will allow hearing-impaired people to be notified by devices that use audio signal as the carrier. The pager will receive a signal from the devices and distinguish which device transmits the signal. The user will then be able to respond to that event. This document is a proposal consisting of an overview of our solution, design considerations, preliminary budget and sources of funding, and project scheduling and team organization. 1 Source: Statistics Canada, Health and Activity Limitation Survey,

5 System Overview Figure 1 shows the basic function of ear. Transmitters will be implemented into the desired devices, and the pager will act as the receiver.

7 5 System Overview Figure 1 shows the basic function of ear. Transmitters will be implemented into the desired devices, and the pager will act as the receiver. The device will transmit the signal when there are input signals. For example, if the phone (device) rings (input signal), the transmitter connected to the phone will broadcast out a signal. The pager will receive the signal and vibrate to let the user know there is a device requiring immediate attention. (vibration) Figure 1 System Overview Figure 2 illustrates the basic control blocks of this system. Signal Input Encode Transmit Receive Decode Output (vibration) Figure 2 System Block Diagram The reason that encoding and decoding processes are required is to be able to distinguish which device is sending the signal since there are more than one device. Also, it will not pick up noise at that particular frequency and treat it as a signal. 5

8 6 Possible Solutions The ultimate goal of this project is to provide a device that will alert hearing-impaired people when certain appliances that emit sound waves are activated. Some of these common appliances are telephone, doorbell, and smoke alarm. Evidently, we need to utilize human senses other than hearing to accommodate these particular users. The possible solutions are listed below. Sight Connect the devices to lights, the device activates the light to inform the user. This approach is easy and cheap to implement. It accomplishes the task, but inconvenient in some situations. If the light is not in user s sight range, which is quite often possible, then he or she will not be able to receive the signal. Installing lights at every visible corner in the house is a possible solution, but it is hopelessly inelegant and inherits the same fundamental problem: what if the user is in his backyard during a sunny day? Touch (1) We can utilize the sense of touch by using a pager similar to the ones used by telephone companies. To accomplish this, we will need to install radio transmitters on doorbell, phone, smoke detector, etc. The transmitter will send different signals to the receiver (pager) when the device is activated. The receiver will then start to vibrate to alert user, and the source of the signals will be displayed on the receiver. This approach solves the fundamental limited imposed by our first solution listed above. And it s relatively (see next solution) easy to build. Touch (2) Build a device that is capable of distinguish audio signals from different devices such as phone, doorbell or smoke alarm. The advantage of this solution as opposed to second alternative is that it is simple for user to install, no specific transmitter design is required for each different device. The disadvantage is that this solution is potentially sensitive to sound noises and requires the supported appliances to be placed close to each other, which might not be the case in many situations. Also, this approach is significantly more complicated to build because of the algorithms and processing power needed to detect different type of sounds, hence it will also be much more expensive than second approach. Proposed Design Solution Based on the possible solutions listed in previous section, we will choose second alternative Touch (1) as our project. 6

9 7 Competition There following three companies are some of the competitors that we have found through the Internet. Their products are described as follows. ADA Enterprises Inc. 2 Smoke Detector and Strobe System - a combination of smoke detector/strobe light in a single unit - the capacity of connecting to and activating additional smoke detectors (smoke detector network) PhoneMac Co. 3 The Clarity Phone - a built-in sound equalizer that selectively increases the volume of the high frequency sounds - high frequency slide bar control - visual ringer light - also an additional portable amplifier available for non-clarity phones New England Assistance Dog Service 4 Hearing Ear Dog for the Deaf - well-trained dogs to recognize and alert their owners to vital sounds (e.g. alarm clock, door bell or door knock, telephone, smoke detector, or a crying baby) - a sense of security and independence for hearing impaired people Even though there are lots of competitors already, we feel strongly that their products all suffer from lack of practicability and efficiency. For example, the products from ADA Enterprises Inc. and PhoneMac Co. use light to alert the user. However, they have the same disadvantage as described in Problem section. The main disadvantage with New England Assistance Dog Service is the expense of training the dog is costly, not everyone can afford this service. ear can eliminate all the disadvantages and provide the user the more convenience at a lower cost. 2 For more information, please refer to 3 For more information, please refer to 4 For more information please refer to 7

10 8 Design Considerations Power Input One 1.5 volts AAA battery Device Input 3 distinct signals from the following objects i) (001) Doorbell in case of visitors at door ii) (010) Telephone in case of upcoming calls iii) (100) Smoke Detector in case of fire or toxic gas (e.g. CO) Device Output 5 LED visual displays with pager vibration i) Power On whenever the device is fully powered up and properly working (no vibration is activated) ii) Low Battery whenever voltage of the battery is low iii) Upcoming Signal 1: Doorbell whenever doorbell sounds iv) Upcoming Signal 2: Telephone whenever telephone rings v) Upcoming Signal 3: Smoke Detector whenever smoke detector alarms Note: the signal vibration is activated periodically as long as one or more of the last four cases above take place. There will be some technical difficulties in this project. Since this project is designed to help people who are hearing impaired, the receiver should be convenient for them to carry around. Thus the size of the receiver must be as small as a pager. Also the receiver must be powered by batteries to be portable. Another concern is that transmitter have to be easy to be implemented into the doorbell and smoke detector. Finally, regulations have to be met according to International Telecommunication Union (ITU) if the product is to be commercially marketed. 8

11 9 Preliminary Budget Table 1 Preliminary Budget Estimation The components Quantity Estimated Cost Pager 1 $ 100 Receiver 1 $ 50 Transmitter 3 $ 150 Smoke detector 1 $ 50 Doorbell 1 $ 30 Cables/Wiring N/A $ 50 Prototype Board N/A $ 50 Misc. Electric Components N/A $ 50 Estimated Total $ 530 Funding To offload some financial burdens from each group member, we plan to apply for financial assistance from the Wighton Development Fund and the Engineering Science Student Endowment fund. Our project is qualified to receive possible funding from both of these two organizations because our project is from ENSC students designed to aid the physically disadvantaged. To save the cost, we will try to recycle old components from abandoned equipment such as old pagers and radios. We will also try to acquire free parts from the manufactures such as Motorola and the local company Electosonics. If there are any additional funding required to complete the project, it will be contributed equally by each group member. 9

12 10 Schedule Planning research Progect Proposal Functional specifications Progress report 1 Design specifications Revising and proof reading Illustrations Creat web site Progress report 2 Progress report Weeks Figure 3 Gantt Chart Planning and Research Progress Report 1 Weeks Functional Specifications Design Specification and Planning and Research Illustrations and Creating web site Progress Report Progress report 2 Revising and Proof reading Figure 4 Milestone Chart 10

13 11 Team Organization The team consists of five individuals - George Tsai, Minhong Zhou, Rick Liu, Daniel Tang, and Aaron Lee. Most of us are in 4 th year engineering and have completed some work-terms. Each group member is assigned a primary duty depending on his skills. George Tsai is the CEO, in charge of overseeing the overall project. He will also be the chief hardware designer because of his extraordinary talent in hardware. Minhong will be primarily responsible for the software aspect of the project. Rick Liu is the documentation specialist. Daniel Tang will work on both software and documentation part of the project. Aaron Lee will assist George Tsai in hardware aspect of the project. A weekly meeting has been set up to ensure the project is on schedule (or realistically, not too far behind), to discuss the details of the project, and to assign detailed tasks to each group member. During every meeting, each group member should report his progress. Based on the reports from each member, various decisions will be made to ensure project can be completed within the expected time frame. In addition, group members will be working close to each other outside of the meeting as well. To maintain a harmonic group dynamic, constructive criticisms and suggestions are recommended, sarcasm and evilly conceived insults will not be tolerated. We distinctly realize that the success of the project relies on the contribution from each group member, the group dynamics, and the desire to accomplish the project. We believe that we will succeed not only because we need it to graduate, but also that we possess the ability to achieve the goal we set out to accomplish. 11

14 12 Conclusion At ear Inc, we dedicate our lives to the welfare of the entire human race, especially those with disabilities. We believe our society has not placed enough emphasis on people with disabilities. All we need is to pay a little more attention, together with innovation and technology, we can make this world a better place to live in for people with disabilities. We are amazed that after vigorous search on Internet, we can not find similar products available for hearing-impaired people. Thanks to George, who first came up with this idea, we believe that this will be a project that will not only make hearingimpaired people s life a little more convenient, but possibly also enrich the group members financially. With these two excellent motivations, it will be unthinkable and inexcusable for us not to complete this project in the shortest time possible. 12

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