Personal alerting technology for people with hearing difficulty: pilot study

People with hearing difficulty need to be alerted in case under conditions of danger (fire, siren) and opportunity (telephone, doorbell). Conventional "hard wired" alerting devices provide a rudimentary and rather awkward mitigation to this need, since they are fixed to a particular location and limited to one or few alerting signals. We envision a more flexible adaptive technology based on identification of alerting sounds by classification of their frequency spectra and use of personal portable alerting devices. We submit initial feasibility information using a classical statistical approach.