The Challenge 

Your brain is a black box. Although it is tasked with understanding the world around you, it is limited to the information of your senses. Unfortunately, human senses are not perfect. Many people are hearing impaired or have lost the ability to see. Even if you have all the normal human senses, you don’t have the smelling capabilities of a dog or 360-degree vision. People are constrained by their biological senses. By combining technology with our biological senses, we can open the door to new experiences. To start, we are developing technology that allows hearing-impaired people to understand speech.

The Solution

Team HART has developed a sleeve with vibrational motors which allows a user to feel language. By combining AI with knowledge of haptics, speech is transformed into patterns. Recent research has shown that the brain can quickly learn and decipher consistent incoming patterns. After developing a minimum viable product, our tests showed that a user using our device can learn their first 10 words in the language of touch in only 5 minutes.

The Mission

The goal of Team HART is to make our world more inclusive and humans more exclusive. By lifting the constraints of our biological senses, anyone will be able to experience the world in the way they want. Team HART aims to develop technology to empower this and make the world more aware of the possibilities of human augmentation by inspiring people to think about its potential. By combining our love for innovation with our social and ethical responsibility, HART aims to bring the topic of human augmentation out of the realm of fiction and make it part of our daily lives.

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