VibeCheck

The better one.

Inspiration

People without the ability to see or hear are left with very few methods of communication. We decided to create this application to increase that number. We first conceived of this idea when we saw Haben Girma on national TV as a blind, deaf, Harvard graduate. She needed an interpreter with her the entire time who typed every word that others said, which she would then read with braille. It occurred to me that we could significantly improve her ability to communicate with the average person when she was alone by making an application. Thus, Vibe Check was born.

What it does

Vibe check has two main functions. It can turn words to text, then it can translate those words to vibrations in morse code, which can be felt and understood by the holder.

How we built it

We used Android Studio to develop the application, and we are using react native to create an iOS version of the application. Another speaker can tap one side of the screen, which triggers a voice-to-text service. We built this using a button, a textfield, and a voice capturing service built into android studio that turned speech to chat. On the other end, we have a button that when tapped, will produce vibrations that correspond to the textfield in morse code. We did this with a vibration object, and we fed it time lengths dependent on dots and dashes from morse code for each letter.

Challenges we ran into

Certain symbols and punctuation have no equivalent outside of spoken language. These, we substituted for a generic buzz for no equivalent. We also found that setting up android studio projects were quite difficult when everyone has different versions, which led to a lot of failing builds.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We began this project rather late into the hackathon, so we're proud that we were able to create a beneficial application in the time span we had.

What we learned

We spent a lot of time working with react native, and we found out just how many differences there are between cross-platform and native applications. In the end, we decided to implement this application with Android Studio because of that.

What's next for Vibe Check

We would like to implement a way for the person to output information as well as for texts that are received on the phone to be automatically converted to morse for immediately interpretation by the owner.