SoundsGood is a project that was submitted to us by Peiqi Tang MID ’12, a graduate student in the Industrial Design department. The project won the “Best of the Best” 2011 Red Dot Design Concept Award.
SoundsGood is a hearing aid specially designed for women who have hearing problems. While collecting and enlarging the sound waves, SoundsGood also translates them into readable signals and show them on the little screen so that the speaker can have immediate response on the volume of his/her own voice. The changing signal is also an elegant decoration. It makes SoundsGood not only a medical device but also a piece of beautiful jewellery.
The signal changes its color and shape according to different sound waves:
Green & soft — perfect
Blue & weak — low volume
Red & strong — too loud
Yellow & sharp — speaking too fastEye contact is also a crucial part in conversations. It creates another level of communication besides speaking and listening. SoundsGood is very close to the eyes, therefore the other party won’t lose eye contact and feel distracted while reading the sound wave signal on the little screen.
Before starting to use SoundsGood, doctors/ technicians need to examine the hearing impaired individual again. Based on the level of impairment, personalized data will be set into the hearing aid. The soundwave patterns will be generated according to these data. Users should undergo the hearing test at the doctors’ regularly, so that the personalized data can be adjusted with time, following the change of the individual’s hearing ability.
Congratulations, Peiqi!
I know this is a concept design, but it doesn't seem like any real-world interviews were done to assess whether hearing-impaired women would want to wear this. It's not discreet, embarrassing as far as I can tell for the wearer to be advertising that she is hearing-impaired, and forces the speaker to learn what the wavelengths mean (who wants to have to explain to someone talking to you how to talk to you "correctly"?). The wavelength also looks distracting for the speaker. Way to keep conversations with the wearer extremely short!
Let's face it, we'll all be going deaf at some point in time if we're lucky to live a long life; this hearing aid shouldn't make people feel older and less useful as they age. Not to sound like a downer, but I'm stunned this won a Red Dot Award. The future of design should be usefulness, not e-waste in a landfill when no-one wants to buy a product that wasn't well thought out.
I'm a hearing impaired woman, have been wearing aids for 20 years & would totally wear these if they could be adjusted for my loss. However, these look more for mild-moderate loss. Doesn't appear to have different programs as many RIC aids do.
Guess what, I DO tell people know that I'm hearing impaired, so if I say something totally weird, they know it's my hearing, NOT my mind. It's our ridiculous culture that has the attitude towards those with hearing loss. Letting people you interact with know that you have hearing loss is helpful & shouldn't make anyone feel older or less useful.
BUT,
does it have tone ranging..shifting the tone for the listener. To many units dont have this, all they do is raise the volume.
Men,too, please. No need to call it jewellery . Hey went for the hands-free phone clips. Call it a screen a device. We don't want them to have an excuse to tune us out. Looking forward to seeing these in production
And just think…he could have spent his time playing video games instead of making the world a better place.