Hyundai delivers ‘freedom of mobility’ to hearing impaired drivers.

Hearing impaired drivers depend on their sight and touch senses. Now, they can overcome their physical limitations, understand their surroundings and communicate with passengers with Hyundai’s ‘freedom of mobility’ initiative.

Hyundai’s innovative technology uses artificial intelligence to analyse internal and external sound patterns and transform them into tactile and visual information for these drivers.

Two driving assist systems called the Audio-Visual Conversion (AVC) and Audio-Tactile Conversion (ATC) work together to generate visual portrayals and sound patterns on the head-up display (HUD).  The steering wheel uses multi-coloured LEDs to provide navigational information, like distance from obstacles, by changing sound data into vibrations the driver can then feel.

Hyundai released a campaign video called ‘Quiet Taxi’ that demonstrates their new technology in action. The full video can be seen here:  youtu.be/yzgNQxYboBY.

Hyundai has not announced plans to make this technology available beyond the current limited application in Seoul, Korea.