SmartAid: A Low-Power Smart Hearing Aid For Stutterers

Interdisciplinary projects combining biomedical and electrical engineering pose an interesting opportunity for today's society. In the future, more and more people will have to rely on wearable devices to monitor and understand biological variables. One of the most key challenges is the design of wearable devices that operate reliably and autonomously for long periods using small batteries. In this paper, we present the design of a novel smart hearing aid for stutterers in which an event-driven architecture is used to minimize power consumption, and onboard processing and actuators help the user to stop stuttering. The design has been implemented using a novel Ambiq Apollo 2 Blue processor, which includes a 5.0 Bluetooth interface with the lowest power consumption on the market and tested in the field. The microcontroller performs the data analyses directly onboard actuating a speaker to help the user when needed. Experimental results show that our solution can last for up to 8 days on a single charge due to its low average power consumption of 1.5 mW during continuous operation, that is reduced to 832 μW in idle.