SoundWatch

Accessibility Lab, University of Michigan

About this app

DISCLAIMER: SoundWatch is a research prototype maintained by a team of student researchers at the University of Washington, and not a finished product. We try our best, but due to the volume of the emails we receive, we may not be able to respond to every query on time. But, every feedback matters, so please continue to share your experience and any improvement suggestions, so we can eventually get to these messages and improve SoundWatch.
Note: A Google Wear OS smartwatch is required for this app. Some options you can use include: Ticwatch Pro 3, Fossil watches, and Moto 360. Samsung watches are not compatible since they use a different OS, called Tizen, which has less support for third party apps. Learn more here.

We bring you SoundWatch, a smartwatch based app that provides glanceable, always-available sound feedback for the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing.

Created by a diverse team at University of Washington and led by a hard-of-hearing innovator who wanted to build for his community, SoundWatch uses machine learning to alert its users to important sounds occurring in their environment.

With everything from critical fire alarms to speech alerts, users know they can rely on SoundWatch to make their environment more accessible. In the spirit of innovation and the spread of knowledge, SmartWatch is freely available and open-sourced for anyone wanting to learn more and contribute to its development.

Ratings and reviews

Great idea, but a little over-enthusiastic. Its picking up ambient noise like thinking the nearby busy road is soft speech and interpreting the pan on the stove as "door in use", even after I turn off that sound on the phone. I think it will be good if it is less sensitive and if it fine tunes its sounds over time. I would love this app for all the sounds I dont hear! I did uninstall for now because it was constantly alerting and I thought it would run down my battery.

This is a great you have developed. Since I am hard of hearing, I have a concern about not hearing the sirens of approaching emergency vehicles. Is there any way this could be included in your app too. Say when the vehicle gets within approximately 300 yards of me. I would appreciate your looking into this as I am sure many others have the same problem. Thank you for your time.

Useful app, detects sound in a matter of seconds. Very handy to just have a sound recognizer device on your wrist. And it works better than my wife's iPhone sound recognizer.

What’s new

Add a slider to adjust the sound levels as user requests.