During the pandemic it became clear to me how important lip-reading is, even for those without hearing impairment. I wanted to create something that would make it easier for people to understand what I was saying. After playtesting different places to wear the device, the forehead was the least awkward and most easy to look at.

The headband uses serial communication to take speech input from a speech-to-text program and sends it to the headband to print the words.

Communication is what makes us humans.

Sharing ideas, stories and lessons is what makes humans so successful. Because we can share what we’ve learned, we are able to build upon the knowledge of previous generations. When I started grad school at NYU’s ITP, I found it difficult adjusting to wearing a mask all day. I was working on group projects with people from all over the world, and not being able to read their lips made it challenging for me to adjust to different accents or judge expression and tone. In our projects we were exchanging ideas and brainstorming about abstract and complicated problems and I realized so much is lost when you miss even a single word. I studied philosophy undergrad and because of that it’s important to me to communicate my ideas as clearly and succinctly as possible. When I was working on these projects, I found myself asking multiple times for someone to repeat what they were saying, because I wasn’t happy just pretending I understood. From this experience, I came up with the idea of a wearable device that would caption conversations live.

You can find more documentation of the creation of this device here.