The aim of the project is to make an unstructured toy for the children who have a hearing problem and are not profound deaf.

After a lot of interviews with the teachers of various schools, doctors, audiologists, parents, children and various other people who are connected with this; gathered information which helped me understand their behavior.

 

How they are different from normal children?

How they respond to things around them?

How sound plays an important role in development?

What problems they face?

While researching on the brief I discovered the importance of the connection between actions and phonetics in the development of a child.

Based on research I found out that alomst 90% of the children are not profound deaf when they are born, so they can undergo treatment and can be introduced to sounds. Based on research various concepts were designed which would fun for the child to play as well as be of some use.

Puzzles for children which would teach them the form, symbols as well as the spelling. This was developed and tested among the children and they liked it a lot.

The head of the toy has revolving parts, the child can make different expressions by moving them. The toy acts as a companion to the child, as they have the habit of having a toy with them all the time. This would be different as it is capable of having different expressions.

Taking forward the same concept,  sound was introduced in the toy. Now the children could hear different sounds based on different expressions. This was possible using sensors which when aligned would give the desired sounds.

- The final concept had the option of recording the parent's voice in the toy and giving it to the child, depending on the lingual age of the child. 
- This made the toy compatible for different age groups and helped the parent to understand if the child is facing problems in hearing.
- The child felt connected to the toy as he had a companion with their parent voice which was very comforting for them.