Behind the Work: How Samsung Spain Opened Up the World for People with ASD
Autism affects around 70 million people around the world and many of those people experience auditory sensitivity, which can trigger anxiety and discomfort and make navigating the noisy world particularly challenging.
That’s why Samsung Espana and Cheil Worldwide Spain created a ground-breaking AI app for people with autism that autonomously turns down the volume on fear-triggering sounds they find disturbing without isolating them by cancelling out noise altogether. The app is the first ever smart noise-management app that works in real-time to enable people to manage individual sounds to suit their needs.
The app, called Unfear, works with Samsung’s Galaxy Buds. It filters out certain sounds - which can be personalised to the user - meaning that they can stay connected to what’s going on in the world and that they don’t have to just shut themselves off from everything. Using machine learning, the app can scan thousands of audio libraries in real time to identify triggering sounds like crying children or barking dogs, to help filter them out.
It’s been a labour of love for the teams at Samsung Espana and Cheil Worldwide Spain, who collaborated with ten Spanish autism organisations - Autism Madrid Federation, Catalan Autisme Federation, Asperger New Life, Nuevo Horizonte Association, Cepri Association for the Research and Study of Mental Deficiency, ADISGUA, Guadarrama Association for People with Disabilities, SumateA and Sur Madrid Autism Spectrum Disorder – as well as over 100 ASD patients and their families. The app was even tested at Las Fallas, a lively festival in Valencia, Spain to make sure that it works under the toughest conditions.
Cheil Worldwide Spain’s Alejandro Di Trolio guides us through the journey of bringing Unfear to life and explains how they’ve ensured that the app really does what it sets out to do.
