Sense It!

Inspiration

Over 5% of the world’s population suffers from disabling hearing loss. That amounts to over 360 million people across the globe. Imagine someone rings the doorbell or someone calls them from across the hall and they have no idea that they are calling them.

What it does

It alerts the user about any activity through vibrations and text.
If someone rings a doorbell then the hearing disabled person can feel vibrations and a small text is displayed on the OLED screen to notify that "Someone is at the door".
If someone is in another room and wants to call you, they can just tap a button on an App curated and linked to "Sense It!". The name of the person who taps the button appears on the OLED screen along with vibration.

How we built it

We made a wristwatch that will alert the user through vibrations and notifications.
We modified the doorbell such that when a person presses it, the doorbell sends a message about the same to the wristwatch, then the wristwatch notifies the user about it through vibrations and text on the OLED screen.
When someone calls the user through the app, a message is sent to the wristwatch from blynk servers about the same and the user is notified through vibrations and a text on which the caller's name is mentioned.
It would function as a normal wristwatch at all other times.

Challenges we ran into

While assembling our hardware, one of us accidentally broke their OLED screen due to which we had to change the complete code architecture to be able to complete the project.
Some pins of our microcontroller behaved weirdly due to which we spend hours trying to debug our code and circuit even if there was no actual bug.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In this pandemic, we were able to complete a hardware project even if we are living far from each other which would help the hearing impaired to remain alert about their surroundings.

What we learned

Creating local web servers on ESP8266
Connecting various sensors and devices to ThingSpeak and Blynk.

What's next for Sense It!

We would make it rechargeable by adding batteries to it.
We would make "Sense it" such that it will hear its surroundings and transmit it to the user through rhythmic vibrations.