Usound - a mobile phone for hearing-impaired people
Designed and developped in Troublemaker Shenzhen
uSound is a personal amplification smart audio system, developed by hearing and sound professionals to help people with hearing impairment at specific situations like:
- Listening to a lesson at school
- Participating of a conversation at lunch time / friends meeting or family
- Participating of a work meeting
- Listening to a conference
- Listening to a movie at home
What’s the project’s story?
Umberto Matias, an Argentinian freelance, has been sent in Shenzhen in 2017 by the start-up Newbrick.
His mission: to prototype and manufacture a hardware device to plug on mobile phones to enable hearing-impaired people to communicate with smartphones. It’s called Usound.
How do they interact with the workshop?
Troublemaker provides Umberto a desk, the workshop to develop the electronical part of his prototype, network and advice on the technologies to use.
Up to now, the Argentinian has already developed the prototype and found the factory (out of the 15 visited).
According to Umberto, the prices offered by Shenzhen are more than competitive. As an example,
- to 3D print 6 parts of the prototype, it would cost 300$ versus 8$ in Shenzhen
- to produce a 20-mm PCB, it would cost 140$ in Argentina and take 15 days versus 80$ to produce 20 of them within 3 days, for a similar quality
What’s next?
On Monday, the first 1000-product batch will be launched in Shenzhen then shipped in Argentina to start a 3-month test phase. If this phase goes well, 20,000 more products will be manufactured in Shenzhen and sent to one of the province of Argentina. The last phase will launch up to 3 million devices.