Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms have saved countless lives, but they won’t do you any good if you can’t hear them. Some alarms also include a flashing light so that deaf people will see the notice, but those can be rare and are not effective when the deaf person is asleep or if the alarm is not within viewing range. Specialty alarm clocks exist that vibrate the bed for waking deaf people, but their application is limited to nighttime sleep in your own bed.
A new iPhone app called Deafalarm hopes to notify deaf people whenever an audio alarm is being sounded in their vicinity. The app is intended to be continuously running in the background, constantly listening for the repetitive signature sounds of alarms. As soon as it identifies an alarm going off, it triggers the phone to vibrate and displays a message on the screen to notify its user of a potential dangerous situation.
For added safety, the app will also vibrate the phone whenever it’s turned off, and when the phone itself powers down due to a dying battery. It’s currently available at the iTunes store for $3, and we hope it will provide deaf people a level of protection that the rest of us with good hearing already benefit from.
iTunes download link: Deafalarm…