AdaptiveSound: An Interactive Feedback-Loop System to Improve Sound Recognition for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users

Sound recognition tools have wide-ranging impacts for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people from being informed of safety-critical information (e.g., fire alarms, sirens) to more mundane but still useful information (e.g., door knock, microwave beeps). However, prior sound recognition systems use models that are pre-trained on generic sound datasets and do not adapt well to diverse variations of real-world sounds. We introduce AdaptiveSound, a real-time system for portable devices (e.g., smartphones) that allows DHH users to provide corrective feedback to the sound recognition model to adapt the model to diverse acoustic environments. AdaptiveSound is informed by prior surveys of sound recognition systems, where DHH users strongly desired the ability to provide feedback to a pre-trained sound recognition model to fine-tune it to their environments. Through quantitative experiments and field evaluations with 12 DHH users, we show that AdaptiveSound can achieve a significantly higher accuracy (+14.6%) than prior state-of-the art systems in diverse real-world locations (e.g., homes, parks, streets, and malls) with little end-user effort (about 10 minutes of feedback).