Wearable Device For Hearing Impaired Individuals Using ZigBee Protocol

Low cost wearable devices for the physically impaired are being developed extensively to enable them to lead a normal life. This paper aims at developing a low cost wearable device for the hearing-impaired. The paper illustrates a device that uses an Arduino, a personal area network with ZigBee nodes and a smartphone to do the processing of speech. Since smartphones are used for speech processing, the system is not speaker dependent. With the help of a smartphone, speech is converted to text and is sent to a base station node which is paired to the smartphone using Bluetooth. Since 8 devices can be paired at once using Bluetooth, group conversations are also made possible for the hearing-impaired. The received text is immediately sent to the node which is in the wearable device and is displayed on an LCD display. We use the sense of vision to give the hearingimpaired a pragmatic sense of hearing.