#embodied sensing

StickEar is a smart sensor that translates sound into visual notifications

In this day and age our daily tasks often include certain levels of concentration because we can be easily distracted by things happening around us. We often work with our headphones on, listening to music, to mute out surrounding noises. This also means that common audible cues are blocked, such as doorbells, or people calling out to you. To us this is just a minor inconvenience, however to the hearing impaired, this is their whole life. 

From the Stickears website,

“The low demand for assistive devices have led to high cost and little innovation. While mobile phones have gotten smarter with each passing day, assistive devices like the door bell for the deaf has pretty much remained the same all these years. “

To find out more about Stickears, we decided to interview Yeo Kian Peen, the CEO of Embodied Sensing to understand the story behind it and how this device can help innovate the world of assistive devices.

Hi Kian! Thanks for doing this interview! I think StickEar is an excellent project and I'm quite excited about it! A simple solution for a persistent problem. Especially for people like me who tend get too engrossed in their work whilst listening to music, having a visual notification would definitely be something useful. Not getting started for people who have actual hearing problems, their need is definitely far greater and this would greatly benefit their lifestyle. 

So anyways based on its production timeline, I saw that StickEar started off as a research project at SUTD in 2012. Would you like to elaborate more on its beginnings for our readers? Like how did the idea started and how did it grew from there?

StickEar had a very interesting beginning. The idea was actually conceived while I was still working at SUTD as a research engineer, and doing an attachment at the MIT Media Lab. During a brainstorming session, I brought up this crazy idea of what if we could detach our ears from our body and attach it anywhere we wanted to, what kind of new interactions could be achieve? And what if we had more than 2 ears? What kind of new abilities could we possess? Can we also lend our ear to an object so that the object can now hear and respond to sound? There was this future vision of ‘sticker-like’ sound sensors that you could just buy in a pack, peel it off and stick it anywhere you wanted to. They would harvest energy from the environment and be able to sense sound.  

There were many possible applications that we wanted to explore with StickEar, from extending our hearing range to sound localization using multiple ears. We presented our work in a few major academic conferences alongside with other research institutes such as Microsoft Research and Disney Research.

The idea somehow got the attention from a group of hearing impaired people in Singapore and we started to co-develop StickEar together. We took away some of our original research ideas and focused on one specific application -  to convert sound into visual notifications, so as to assist them in their everyday life in responding to sound events at home or at work.

In early 2014, I made a bold move to leave SUTD and start my own company Embodied Sensing to further work on commercialising StickEar.

As of now what are the main issues that you think might arise once StickEars is deployed? If there aren't any, what were the main challenges that the team faced during the development process?

One of the important concerns that we have is the reliability of our detection algorithms. While we have taken efforts to make our recognition algorithm as accurate as we can, it is in reality not possible to achieve a 100% accuracy. We have chosen to be less ambitious for the first product iteration, just focusing on detecting a few specific types of sound in order to have less false alarms. Managing expectations is important and we want to be sure that users do understand that StickEar will work well in most situations and can be tolerant in few unexpected false alarms.

On the StickEar website, it is stated that "The low demand for assistive devices have led to high cost and little innovation", I have a feeling this is due to the fact that we take for granted the little things that people with disability are unable to do, for us not being able to hear someone knocking on our door because we're on headphones is a minor annoyance but for the hearing impaired that's a major problem. However not many people are willing to spend money to solve a minor annoyance so I'm glad that you guys have partnered up with deaf organisations for backers to donate StickEars to. 

In the future what do you think would help increase the demand for these kind of assistive devices in order to make it more affordable for the common users?

Having interacted with many deaf people here in Singapore, the most common feedback I have been getting from them is that assistive devices can be expensive and there is very little product choices for them. Some of the products do not have a nice design and its just very primitive in terms of the technology. I personally believe that universal/inclusive design is the way to go. Devices should be designed to be inclusive for everyone. It should not be just viewed as just an assistive device for a specific group of people, but rather something that anyone else with a need can use.

Moving forward, does the team have any future plans on developing other kinds of sound related assistive devices? Especially with sound classification being the core technology behind StickEar. I imagine having a means of detecting and recognising sounds would definitely be useful in all kinds of applications!

There is a whole lot of possibilities with StickEar when we start to think about other sounds that we can detect and classify, especially now that everything is connected to the cloud and there is so much processing power there. Think of StickEar as being a small portable wireless sound sensor where in the future we can load different sound apps into it. Today it could be attached  to your car where it can hear and tell you if the engine is working fine. Tomorrow, it could be placed beside your baby’s bed to tell you why your baby is crying – whether he/she is hungry, bored or sick. It will be exciting!