Ombi

The noise-cancelling headphone designed for conversation, not stigma.

Role:

Project Leader

Responsibilities:

User research, storytelling, pitch deck creation, journey mapping, electrical engineering, prototyping, fabrication

Project Duration:

9 months

Final Deliverable:

Ombi was developed to the prototype stage by myself, Sayla Tenenbaum, James Sannino, and Parker Barnett during graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania.

Objective

Ombi is the product created to assist those who have trouble engaging in conversation in loud environments. My thesis team had 9 months to analyze a domain in which to develop a product from concept to prototype and present a viable pitch to a VC panel.

To target our domain, we began thinking about assistive devices as they are today (hearing aids, amplifiers, etc.) and how we could evolve them into an aesthetically pleasing and desirable consumer product.

We decided to redesign a hearing experience that would beat stigmas, be more accessible, and ultimately grant new freedoms to anyone.

Research

You are probably familiar with the environment in the sound clip below:

If you’re like most people when it gets this loud, it’s incredibly hard to have a conversation without yelling, lip-reading, repeating yourself or leaning closer.

With this, we came to realize a simple issue that still remains ubiquitous and unsolved:

Conversations in loud environments are a struggle even with great hearing.

From restaurants to social events, people are always struggling to connect and communicate in environments that are meant to promote this very behavior. So our team came up with Ombi:

The first headphone to use active noise control and bone conduction to transform loud environments into conversation-friendly atmospheres.

Loud Restaurant

Before we could begin designing Ombi, we had to better understand how sound volumes and frequencies affect conversation in different spaces.

The decibel or dB is the unit used to measure the intensity of a sound or simply, the volume.

Conversation at a normal volume takes place at around 60 dB, but the volume in your average restaurant typically floats in between 80-95 dB, with subways and concerts reaching levels well over 100 dB.

Environments with high decibel levels, while annoying and difficult for people with normal hearing, can be debilitating for those struggling with any level of hearing impairment.

48 million American adults have a noticeable level of hearing impairment

and

29 million American adults could benefit from using a hearing aid, but don’t use them

For the hard of hearing, situations like these are isolating and conversations with family and friends can be unintelligible.

Places with lots of environmental noise affect more than just our experiences at restaurants. Our experience during busy commutes and our ability to concentrate in today’s common workplaces, such as Starbucks or WeWork, can all suffer.

If we could solve the issues for the hard of hearing, we could simultaneously transform audio experiences for anyone, anywhere.

Insights and Design Criteria

After interviewing many individuals with varying levels of hearing ability (from completely deaf to the slightest of hearing loss), we gained an incredible amount of insight into the situational and emotional struggles they face on a daily basis. We heard things like:

“I can’t go to most restaurants in the city because I’m not able to hear what my friends are saying while we are there.”

And when asked whether they have tried an assistive hearing device they said:

“I used a hearing aid once, but all it did was amplify everything, I couldn’t distinguish noise from conversation.”

“Hearing aids are so hideous and people wouldn’t look at me the same way if I wore one.”

These struggles and stigmas guided our design criteria for the development of Ombi.

Using these as boundaries for our design, we began the hunt of exploring different materials, wrap-around configurations, colors, styles, visibility, folding mechanics, and how it might interact with other head and ear accessories like hats, glasses or earrings.

Technology

Our core technology was centered around bone conduction and active noise control.

Why choose bone conduction instead of speakers?

First, bone conduction works by conducting sound waves directly through the surface of your skull where they vibrate through the bone and are picked up and translated in the inner ear. This is compared to normal hearing where sound waves pass through the air and the eardrum picks up those vibrations to send to the inner ear.

The primary benefit is that it’s not in your ear so you can still hear what is going on around you while listening through bone conduction.

The second aspect, active noise control, is the technology used in noise-cancelling headphones. The way active noise control cancels certain sounds is by recording a sound wave, running it through a digital signal processor which creates an inverse sound wave at the same frequency, and then outputting that wave towards the original to neutralize it.

Our aesthetic was driven heavily by user feedback about headphone styles, jewelry, popular wearables which drove us to materials that were soft yet but durable and colors that were simple and stylish.

Comfort was a complicated metric not only because the ears and head are sensitive areas of the body, but because bone conduction’s effectiveness is directly related to its pressure against a bone which can be very uncomfortable if designed incorrectly.

For this reason we incorporated a soft silicone on the pressure points and an ergonomic design using spring steel meant to fit most head shapes and sizes.

Ombi was intentionally designed to be discrete. By resting behind the ears, Ombi doesn’t discourage conversation the way traditional headphones do and allows your ears to be open and listen normally. Ombi also has a collapsible design making it easy to pull out and put away as desired.

Final Product

Our final solution contained both a digital and physical component: an app and a two-part physical product.

The Ombi app gave users a couple different features The first was being able to adjust the volume of the environmental noise around them while the second gave them the ability to change their hearing bandwidth from either a focused beam in front of them to a wider aperture including everything in front of them. Users also had the ability to change the bass and treble of the sound.

This allowed them to focus in on a one-on-one conversation or be able to hear multiple people at a gathering.

The physical product was made up of an aesthetic design and a functional design.

The aesthetic design was fabricated with the intended materials and encapsulated the comfort, fit, and style for which we were aiming.

The functional design incorporated the technology used within the headphone that allowed users to wear and hear through a working prototype. This had the working wearable unit coupled with an external auxiliary box where the electronics were housed.

Overall, Ombi was an incredible journey through human-centered design where my team was able to target a market and deliver an incredible solution to a universal problem. Our project ended with a final presentation to a number of professors, VCs, fellow students, and professional attendees from related industries.