Quietude, the interactive jewellery that conquers hearing impairment

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Quietude, the interactive jewellery that conquers hearing impairment

At the 11th Florence Biennale 2017, the University of Siena presented Quietude, a project in which technology and aesthetics are combined to create interactive jewellery that overcomes hearing impairment.

‘Having a disability should not be an obstacle to feeling beautiful and desired’ is the noble thought that guided Patrizia Marti, professor at the University of Siena, in the conception and realisation of the Quietude project. Technology has finally caught up with the sense of aesthetics: too many times, people with disabilities have felt a sense of shame, hiding to avoid showing their medical devices to others. It is with this in mind that Quietude was born, an intervention to overcome deafness and restore sound in the form of lights, vibrations and different structures.
It is a project of the Fab Lab of the University of Siena, entirely funded by the European Union and carried out thanks to partnerships with companies and organisations of the calibre of Glitch Factory, T4All, Siena Art Institute and University of Southern Denmark, to transform a stigma into an object of desire.

In fact, a team of experts, whose skills range from engineering to psychology, set to work and created an app capable of recording sound, recognising and communicating it and, at the same time, jewellery capable of giving visual feedback of the sound to the wearer. All through the use of recycled and environmentally sustainable materials such as regenerated leather or eco-fabrics, combined with the miniaturisation of technology, which is crucial in order to best express the aesthetic sense of the jewellery.
The Quietude project, which started only six months ago, involved deaf women of all age groups at every stage, from design to evaluation. ‘The ultimate goal is to be able to recognise all sounds through jewellery, but especially those that are important to each individual person, such as the singing of cicadas or the sounds of nature. It is a limitation of technology to only stop at functionality,’ says Patrizia Marti, who has been working with disabled people for 20 years. Today, the jewellery collection of the Quietude project was presented to a community of people with hearing disabilities at the Siena Art Institute so that further feedback could be gathered and improvements could be made. These jewels, in fact, will soon turn from a research project into a commercial product. Now the word goes out to investors to make the dreams of deaf people come true.

Fonte Siena news

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