Development of a waterproof, alert device for hearing impaired water polo player

Abstract

Gabriel suffers from a bilateral sensorineural hearing loss and wears hearing aids. He is a keen water polo player and plays with the junior team of a first division club. There are currently no waterproof hearing aids able to withstand the rigours of water polo, and therefore Gabriel must remove his hearing aids while he plays. Gabriel’s greatest handicap while playing is that he cannot hear the referee’s whistle. This severely hampers his ability to respond quickly and at times compromises the performance of his team. His future as a water polo player is at risk unless a solution can be found. This project aims to develop an electronic device able to pick-up the referee’s whistle hence providing an alerting signal. The main objective of this project is to develop an electronic device able to detect the water polo referee’s whistle hence translating the audio alerting signal to a haptic vibrating signal. The device must be waterproof and must be robust enough to withstand the game; keeping in mind that water polo is a high contact sport. Ideally, the device should be worn in the player’s water polo cap as wearing the device on any other part of the body would provide the opponent with a means of holding on to Gabriel, which is far from ideal in the game. The problem that Gabriel has was thoroughly analysed, and a system to solve this problem was designed. The system designed consists of two main subsystems: whistle detection subsystem and alerting subsystem. The whistle detection subsystem interprets the referee’s whistle and transmits a cue to the alerting subsystem. The alerting system alerts Gabriel when the referee whistles by transmitting haptic cues. This system consists of an electronic device incorporated within the cap’s ear guard. The player’s head cap is the safest place to incorporate the electronics since it will be out of water most of the time. An Android mobile phone app was developed which is able to pick up and interpret the referee’s whistle in real-time. An electronic device was developed which can communicate with the mobile phone and alert Gabriel when necessary. The developed embedded hardware and software were tested, verified and validated within a controlled environment to ensure that the design criteria were met.