AWARD YEAR
2021
CATEGORY
Community
GOALS
Good Health & Well-being, Trust, Tolerance & Empathy
KEYWORDS
hearing impaired, Community involvement, conversation, Deaf/Hard of Hearing People, haptic technology
COUNTRY
Netherlands
DESIGNED BY
Hiroki Sato
WEBSITE
https://hiroki-s.com/project/kico
Kico
Hearing agency for hard-of-hearing people
Kico is a system to create communal efforts by both hard-of-hearing people and normal hearing people to engage in understandable conversation, and is conceptualised to function as agency for hard-of-hearing people by artificial intelligence understanding each person’s hearing difficulty.
Normal-hearing people are reminded to speak at appropriate pitch, volume and speed through haptic feedback by the system, on behalf of hard-of-hearing people. They can also learn the proper way of speaking through watching visualization of volume, pitch and speed (character per second in transcribed text) of their voice in user interface.
With this machine, hard-of-hearing people play a role in training the system. A function to record and play back recent conversation enables them not only to listen back by themselves to understand what was said, but also to mark the difficult sounds, by which the system figures out personalized parameters for threshold in triggering feedback.