HUDWAY Drive: The Visual Assistant for Drivers with Hearing Loss

HUDWAY introduces the portable heads-up display & GPS navigation, which helps people with hearing loss get rid of extra stress and significantly reduces distractions behind the wheel and keep their eyes on the road. HUD makes it easy to safely follow the navigation directions and keep track of your speed.

While vision is undeniably a driver’s most important sense, hearing plays a large part in how you interact with the world, even while you are in the car. Nearly half of the population over the age of 65 has some form of hearing loss, and a fair share of them still drive themselves and their loved ones to and from work and running errands. Hearing loss can’t stop them from driving a car, but extra measures should be taken for their own safety and safety of other people in the vehicle.

HUDWAY introduces a portable aftermarket Head-Up Display (HUD), called HUDWAY Drive, specially designed for drivers with hearing loss that helps you to stay connected with your favorite apps such as Maps, Messengers and also see the incoming calls and notifications projected through your windshield. Now you can have both of your hands on the wheel and keep your eyes on the road.

As numerous studies and interviews with drivers with hearing loss have shown, these are reasons why hearing loss makes everyday commute and long journeys behind the wheel more difficult:

• Vision is the only sense you can rely on behind the wheel;
• Therefore the voice assistant of your favorite navigation app is useless. While looking at the road, you don’t have a benefit of receiving warnings, turn-by-turn directions, and speed limits — so way too often you get distracted by visually checking the navigation apps and dashboard. For the same reason, you might miss a turn or get a speeding ticket;
• Not being able to hear horns and emergencies on the road might leave you with a lack of time to react properly;
• We are all busy and sometimes are tight on our schedules, which makes us check texts and notifications or participate in video-calls while driving. All that takes away our attention and might lead to unpleasant consequences.

HUDWAY Drive addresses these problems with a HUD on the driver’s line of sight — so you see all the information projected through your windshield, with a virtual image floating above the hood. It can be easily removed and put into a glove compartment when you do not need it. It connects to your smartphone wirelessly via BT to get directions, incoming calls, and text.

Here is how you drive with HUDWAY Drive:

• Always see your current speed and limit in front of your eyes. If you are speeding, you’ll see warning signals — right there on the road where you are normally looking while driving;

• If you are going to an unfamiliar place, you search and start routing in the app — and you always have turn-by-turn directions right in front of your eyes: distance to the maneuver, lines, and where you need to turn. A visual assistant will draw your extra attention before the maneuver;

• When you receive a message or other notification from your fav apps — see whether a notification is worth pulling over to read and reply. View message preview and other notifications without having to focus your attention on a phone;

• Whenever a call comes in — see who’s calling without having to reach for your smartphone. See if you actually want to pick up :)

• If you like to control every bit of your vehicle, such as RPM, oil or engine temperature — with any OBD-II dongle HUDWAY Drive app is able to read it and show it to you in HUD mode.

“… and the virtual image is floating above the hood at a distance of 8ft. from the driver’s eyes, so you don’t have to frequently refocus your sight. Vision is the only thing that drivers with hearing loss can rely on and we would like to reduce this load through convenient and useful technologies in the vehicle.” — said Ivan Klabukov, CEO and Co-founder of HUDWAY.

Driving is all about being aware of what’s going on around you; traffic horns and emergency siren might be an issue. That’s why we are also working on adding the extra feature — ambient sounds recognition, which would help to draw the driver’s attention if something noisy is going on nearby.

The mass production just launched, and the devices will be available on the US market in September 2020. Check our website for additional information and availability.

Drive safe!

HUDWAY company:

HUDWAY is a California based company that makes hardware and software solutions to enhance driving safety and comfort while staying connected behind the wheel. At the moment, the company has already launched 7 products for b2c and b2b markets. HUDWAY has been ranked in the TOP-10 of The Most Innovative Companies in the Automotive Sector.