The Sight for Hearing: An IoT-Based System to Assist Drivers with Hearing Disability

The objective of this paper is to propose a new system to assist drivers with hearing disability, deaf or unfocused persons by recognizing and transforming audible signals, such as emergency vehicle sirens or honks into alerts displayed in the dashboard. Such conversion from audio to alert messages attracts the attention of unfocused drivers to hear the honking of other cars, and enhances the safety and the quality of life for deaf or hard-of-hearing drivers. We develop an IoT based system to identify, denoise and translate any significant voice signal around the driver's car into alert messages. The signal acquired by sensors is processed to identify the source and display the associated message through the use of several machine learning models with majority voting. Our experiments results show that the proposed solution is able to achieve a 95% accuracy when trained and validated against a real dataset of 600 files.