Design and Development of a Non-Auditory Baby Monitoring System for Hearing-Impaired Parents
Olugbenga OLONIYO, Damilare Samuel FOLOWO & Fredrick ADENIRANYE
This paper presents the design and development of a non-auditory, cost-effective, baby monitoring system specifically tailored for hearing-impaired parents. Conventional audio-based baby monitors are inept for the hearing impaired community, creating a significant gap in childcare accessibility whereby necessitating alternative notification or alert mechanisms. This research presents a multimodal monitoring system employing visual, haptic and mobile alerts to address this accessibility gap. This system uses ESP 32 microcontrollers with advanced sound detection algorithms to identify baby cries and deliver real-time notification through multiple channels. Thorough evaluation with 150 trials per condition across varied acoustic environments demonstrated 96% detection accuracy in typical home settings with 98ms response time. User studies with 18 hearing-impaired parents validated system effectiveness, achieving 4.7/5.0 satisfaction scores and significant improvements in sleep quality and parental confidence. The low-cost design ($47 component cost) offers 38-hour battery life with both connected and offline operation modes. The complete system is released as open-source to enable community adoption and customization for broader accessibility impact. This research contributes to assistive technology development and in addition, provides a foundation for improving childcare accessibility for the hearing-impaired community