Wearable haptics reacting to determine direction of sound?
New forum member here,
Hello everyone! First some basic backstory on myself, A few months ago I suffered Sudden Sensoneural Hearing Loss. (SSHL) This has left me completely deaf in my left ear. This has removed my ability to determine the direction any given sound is coming. I am a biologist and have always been interested in transhumanism and body modification. This forum seemed like a great place to learn and experience new ideas. Now on to the meat of the question.
Humans require two points of reference (ears) to sense the direction a sound is coming from. Sound coming from one side is detected by that sides ear and the other ear picks of the sound a fraction of a second later, the brain then interprets the time difference to determine direction and to a much lesser degree, distance. Would it be possible to design a pair of wearables that work in concert with hearing aids to determine whatever sound is loudest and vibrate to give a rough sense a sounds direction?
My initial thought is that a good position for this would be a necklace that vibrates on either the left or right side of the neck, input being sent from a pair of modified hearing aids such as a CROS system. While you wouldn't be able to pinpoint sounds you would at least know what side they were coming from.
Humans require two points of reference (ears) to sense the direction a sound is coming from. Sound coming from one side is detected by that sides ear and the other ear picks of the sound a fraction of a second later, the brain then interprets the time difference to determine direction and to a much lesser degree, distance. Would it be possible to design a pair of wearables that work in concert with hearing aids to determine whatever sound is loudest and vibrate to give a rough sense a sounds direction?
My initial thought is that a good position for this would be a necklace that vibrates on either the left or right side of the neck, input being sent from a pair of modified hearing aids such as a CROS system. While you wouldn't be able to pinpoint sounds you would at least know what side they were coming from.
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Sounds like the idea could work to me. If all you want from this device is to tell you which direction the loudest sound is coming from, using an Arduino and a couple sound detectors might be able to detect which microphone (left or right) has the highest signal. From there, it should be easy to turn on a vibrating motor on whichever side you want.
Background noise would probably be a problem but maybe you could just filter the microphone signals to only use sounds above a certain level to determine direction.
Those sound detector boards have an audio output which might be able to be used as the inputs for the hearing aid combining the two back to mono to go into your good ear.
I wonder if a belt mounted device would work almost as good as one around your neck and be more hidden. Less robot-like.
@ThomasEgi Thanks for giving a little more depth on the functions of hearing! I felt a little awkward having a big wall of text on the first post. As to the reason for hearing loss, idiopathic. I simply awoke one morning with total deafness on one side except for roaring tinnitus. Most likely suspects are an infection or autoimmune response that damaged the cochlear nerve.
I think it may be time to hit up one or two of my engineering buddies. While I can safely do solder repairs I have never entertained something this complex. Also great idea on the cardioid mics, I was concerned about interference from my own clothes as I moved around wherever this rig gets placed, need more coffee.
Say you converted the sound into vibrations or even electrical stimulation pulses, would you eventually learn to "hear" those signals and be able to interpret different sounds or maybe even words?
Since, I assume, you can still hear out of the other ear, maybe that hearing combined with a vibrating signal could be used to learn to hear vibrations as sound. If the microphone was built into a device that fit your bad ear, you might even get the sense of direction back and use the ear itself as the reflector to make the microphone more directional.
I'm interested in what you come up with.
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans?language=en
If you haven't heard David Eagleman talk about expanding senses or restoring senses through augmentation I highly recommend it.