Mumbai: The idea of a smart watch for people with hearing impairment came from the unlikeliest source: dance.
Years ago, when Janhavi Joshi and Nupura Kirloskar were students of Industrial Design at MIT, Pune, they had to address a problem affecting special needs individuals and design a solution to it. Ms. Joshi, a Kathak dancer, didn’t have to look far for inspiration.
“We initially chose the problem of deaf dancers,” says Ms. Joshi. “When they dance, they’re continuously looking at their teacher who shows them the counts.” If the dancers could not hear the music, then how could they enjoy the dance, she wondered.
And that is how the idea of Bleewatch took shape. The watch would “listen” and transmit the music into vibrations, with the level of vibrations changing with the change in beat and intensity. “We wanted to make them independent of the teacher so they could enjoy what they were doing on stage,” says Ms. Joshi.
After completing the course, the two joined hands two years ago to begin an enterprise to make Bleewatch on a commercial scale. But this time, they were addressing more than dance movements. The inability to communicate, they felt, was the main reason that over 60 million hearing-impaired people in India were isolated.
“When we began meeting deaf people, we realised that the same concept of conveying sound through vibrations is something that can be used in different areas of their lives,” says Ms. Joshi.
The product
Bleewatch’s uniqueness is contained in four features: Listen, Talk, Help and Dance.
The first one, Listen, concentrates on sounds in the environment and notifies the user of ones that are of a particular frequency. Common sounds such as alarms, doorbells and car horns are all covered in this. ‘Talk’ allows pre-recorded sentences to be played as and when necessary, depending on the user’s daily routine. “Most deaf people cannot speak, and even a few sentences makes conversation a lot easier,” says Ms. Joshi. The third is an SOS feature wherein if you are in trouble, a touch of the button sends your location to your registered emergency contacts. Most families are afraid to let a hearing-impaired person leave the house alone as they cannot communicate with them in case of a problem. Dance converts music into vibrations of varying intensities, which allows dancers to follow the song.
While they aren’t the first enterprise to address needs of the hearing-impaired, their product is unique, says Ms. Joshi. “There are apps which provide speech and voice recognition, but they do not work properly,” says Ms. Joshi. Also, the apps work differently on different phones due to a change in hardware. Bleewatch uses its own hardware which, instead of cancelling noise the way smartphones do, filters through the sounds and only uses what is necessary, something apps cannot do with the same dexterity.
A commercial launch of 50 watches is planned next month, after which they plan to produce a batch of 1,000 watches and then opt for crowdfunding. Within the next two years, they hope to have supplied 25,000 units.
Resistance to tech
Ironically, the main hurdle they face is from the hearing-impaired community. “They are not very empowered economically. We need to educate them about technology and how it will help them.” Also, the recalcitrance towards technology stems from hearing aids. “If you look at hearing aids, their penetration is only 1.4% of the [deaf] population. They hate wearing these aids.”
She calls the aids ‘an enforced sense’ for them. “Imagine I don’t know what sound is like and suddenly I get this machine which exposes me to a sense I am not used to. We can ignore ambient noises because our brain is trained to do so, but for them it is absolute chaos.” This effect gives technology a poor reputation within the community and makes them averse to it. Hearing aids are also highly expensive and not many can afford them.
Another issue, says Ms. Joshi, is changing peoples’ mindsets. “[The hearing-impaired person] is used to receiving sympathy and donations and we want to break that mindset.”
In spite of their issues of market access, the team is seeing promising results with the prototypes being tested. A deaf couple testing the watch recently had a baby, and the mother would originally tie a string to her hand and that of her child’s so that she would know if the baby moved or started crying during the night. Now, the watch allows them to place the baby in a separate bed for the night.
Bridging gaps
Ms. Joshi wants to further develop the dance capabilities of the watch. The idea is to work on an algorithm which will allow them to experience the music. “If we can convert the music into vibrations, it’ll be interesting,” she says.
Additionally, the company hopes to spread awareness. “It’s not really technology that drives us but the service that we provide to the community,” she says. Since both founders are industrial designers, the idea is to design products that will fulfill the needs of a hearing-impaired individual. “They are very visual people but their language skills are poor. The areas where we find a gap we need to bridge through technology and design.”
