WristEcho is a wearable for People of Determination. It listens for the sounds that matter, like a knock, a fire alarm or someone calling your name, and turns each one into its own vibration and a vivid alert on your wrist.
Tap a sound to see and feel its alert
Incubated at the HCT Sharjah Incubation Center · Built and tested in the UAE
430 million people live with disabling hearing loss.1 A smoke alarm must reach 85 decibels.2 To someone who can't hear it, it's silent.
Doorbells, alarms, sirens and voices all assume you can hear them. Flashing-light alerts are fixed to one wall and only help if you're looking. WristEcho goes with you to every room, the street and the classroom.
The AI that recognises sounds runs on the wearable itself. No phone, no internet, no waiting.
Every half second, WristEcho looks at the latest second of sound from its microphone.
A neural network on the device, Google's YAMNet, scores what it hears against 521 kinds of sound, from knocks to sirens.
A sound has to last before it counts, and look-alikes are ruled out. A phone ringtone never sets off the fire alarm.
Each sound gets its own colour on the screen and its own rhythm on your wrist, even over the lock screen.
Ringtone → Knock ✓
Sound alerts run YAMNet through Google MediaPipe, entirely on the wearable. Names and live captions use Deepgram Nova-3 speech recognition through a relay on Cloudflare Workers. The interface is built with Jetpack Compose.
Within a day you can tell the door from a siren by feel alone. Tap a sound to play its rhythm at real speed.
Every alert fills the screen with its own colour, in English or Arabic.
If two happen at once, the most urgent wins, in the order listed.
Record a sound five times and WristEcho learns it, whether it's the kettle, the intercom, the baby or your own doorbell. You choose its colour and its rhythm.
Teach it your name, and it tells you every time someone calls you, about a second after they say it, in English or Arabic.
Sounds are only half of it. WristEcho also helps with the people around you.
Tap Captions and speech appears on your wrist as people talk, in English or Arabic. It pauses by itself after 30 seconds of quiet.
When someone calls you, your wrist knows within about a second, every time they say it.
An animated signer shows signs for words in the captions: 60 in American Sign Language and 6 in Arabic Sign Language. An early approximation, not interpretation.
Sound alerts are recognised on the device, and that audio never leaves it.
Fire alarm, siren, door and azan alerts need no phone and no internet.
With mobile data, names and captions use a secure online speech service.
Chosen on first start, with a full right-to-left layout in Arabic.
WristEcho is the whole device, not an app you open. It starts listening the moment it turns on.
Alerts flash about once a second, well under the three-flashes-a-second photosensitivity limit.
Our first tester wore WristEcho at home. When someone called her name, it reached her wrist, and she turned around smiling.Blen Gebeyehu's nieceBlen is a co-founder of WristEcho
Uses name alerts, live captions and the door alert
We say it openly: our first tester is family. She wore WristEcho at home while we built it.
Ali tested WristEcho at his desk. When the fire alarm went off, his wrist flashed red and pulsed three times, the rhythm that means fire.AliStudent who is hard of hearing
Felt the fire alarm's three pulses
Two short films, shot by the people wearing WristEcho. Jump to any moment.
Filmed on the wearable's first prototype. Sound on.
We run hands-on demos for families, schools and organisations that support People of Determination. Tell us a little about you and we'll set one up.