Stop irritating chatter with speech-jammer!

If “shhhh” doesn’t work, the Speech Jammer might. This device renders chatterers speechless! Who knows, the Speech Jammer may one day find its way into classrooms and debates. This device created by Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada won the 2012 Ig Nobel prize in acoustics.

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.

The Speech Jammer uses our own speaking to silence us. For the average person, speaking requires us to hear ourselves. If that feedback becomes distorted, the person slows down and then stops talking.

The Speech Jammer records a person’s voice and plays it back with a slight time delay (a few hundred milliseconds). This feedback of hearing your words again, slightly after you’ve said them, is so disruptive that it renders you speechless. Perhaps, with practice, one might be able to overcome the speech jammer and continue speaking, but to the best of our knowledge, it hasn’t been done yet. Kurihara and Tsukada have posted a YouTube video of their Speech Jammer in action, which you can see below.

The speech jammer is composed of a directional microphone, a time delay integrated circuit, and a directional speaker to play the sound back. All of the components are well known, but the novelty stems from how they are used together.

For further information about the physics behind the Speech Jammer, please visit Physics Central.

Dress gives vibrotactile feedback to help those with hearing loss

Here is one interesting example of clothes that are more than just expensive ways to cover our nakedness. 

With the rapid advancement of mobile, flexible, and even plant-based technologies, clothing has become yet another medium upon which to explore the limits both of science and fashion. Wearable technology has really started to come into its own, with fashion designers and engineers collaborating to imagine where their fields might overlap in the not-so-distant future. While the idea of energy-generating shoes and gloves embedded with LED turn signals might sound far-fetched, the reality is that wearable technologies are already helping to make our world a cleaner, healthier place.

FLUTTER dress for the hearing impaired

For those who are partially or fully deaf, independent living can be a challenge. Hearing aids, lip reading and sign language ensure that hearing impaired are able to communicate with those around them, but being unable to hear environmental sounds can be dangerous. Finding a way to alert hearing impaired individuals to warning sounds in their surroundings would enable them to safely venture out into the world without constant supervision.

Flutter is a perfect example of the way textiles and robotics can be combined to improve the quality of life for disabled individuals. Created by Halley Profita, Nicholas Farrow, and Professor Nikolaus Correll at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Flutter dress gives vibrotactile feedback in the direction of a loud sound or alarm to help those with hearing loss respond more intuitively to their external environment. The team also says that development of this wearable technology would also cut down on e-waste created by discarded hearing devices.

Info from Tree Huger