A belt that looks good & alerts deaf people in emergencies

A group of mechanical engineering students from Sri Lanka have won the first prize in a prestigious competition for designing a lightweight wearable waist belt.

Called i-belt it has two main functionalities to help the deaf. It has a built in system with a range of mini microphones and mini vibrators. It has an inbuilt voice recognition system, that can react to five selected word inputs and quickly alert the user through a special pattern of vibration by picking up the accurate direction of the source sound.

This converts to a vibration in the belt that corresponds to the direction of the selected sound. The sounds selected may be the name of the user or special words like help, run etc.

The belt can also alert the user for high noises in emergency situations for quick reaction like siren noise, vehicle horn, gun shooting, dog barking etc. So for instance if a deaf person is at risk from a vehicle behind him and the vehicle is blowing its horn, the i-belt will vibrate and cause the user to look behind.