Picture this: you take out your hearing aids before bed, ready for sleep. But instead of feeling relaxed, anxiety creeps in. What if there’s a fire alarm? What if your baby cries? What if someone breaks in? For people with hearing impairments, bedtime can be terrifying rather than restful. Here’s a sobering fact: people with hearing impairments are up to seven times more likely to suffer from sleep disorders than the general population. Seven times. That’s not just about missing a few hours of rest. Chronic sleep anxiety can seriously impact your health, your mood, and your quality of life.
Enter Hearo, a brilliant design concept by Hyunjae Noh that’s tackling this overlooked problem head-on. The name cleverly combines “hearing” with the ring-shaped “O,” creating a hero that guards your sleep when your ears can’t.
Designer: Hyunjae Noh
So what exactly is Hearo? It’s a two-part system consisting of a hub and a smart ring. The hub, which looks like a stylized ear (how fitting!), does double duty as a charging station and sound detection device. While you sleep with the ring on your finger, the hub listens for specific sounds you’ve chosen through the companion app. When its AI detects one of those important sounds, like a fire alarm, doorbell, or baby crying, it sends a signal to your ring, which vibrates to wake you up or alert you to the situation.
The concept was inspired by Noh’s own experience in the Navy, where he used a vibrating alarm on his watch to wake up for night watch duty. He later witnessed someone with hearing impairment setting an alarm before bed, clearly worried about whether they’d actually wake up on time. That moment sparked the idea: what if we could deliver important sounds through vibrations instead of relying solely on hearing?
What makes Hearo particularly clever is how customizable it is. Through the app, you choose exactly which sounds matter to you. Maybe you need to hear smoke alarms and your doorbell, but don’t care about car horns outside. You pick what gets through to you, creating a personalized alert system that doesn’t overwhelm you with every little noise.
But Hearo goes beyond just sound alerts. The ring is packed with health monitoring features, including photoplethysmography (PPG) and heart rate sensors that track your sleep patterns and analyze your overall health through the app. It’s like having a sleep coach and safety monitor rolled into one tiny device on your finger. The design details show real thoughtfulness too. Instead of using metal, which would feel cold and uncomfortable against your skin all night, Hearo is made from low heat conductivity plastic. It’s significantly lighter and more comfortable for extended wear. Because let’s face it, if a device isn’t comfortable, you won’t use it consistently, no matter how useful it is.
Hearo isn’t just a student project collecting dust either. It’s already won serious recognition, including the 2025 Red Dot Award Design Concept Best of the Best and the 2025 iF Design Student Award. Noh’s goal is to develop a fully working prototype and exhibit it at CES, working toward making Hearo a real product that people can actually buy and use. Of course, there’s still work to be done. The AI needs training to improve sound recognition accuracy, ensuring it reliably catches critical sounds like fire alarms or crying babies while filtering out false alarms. The internal hardware design needs refinement. But the foundation is solid, and the need is definitely there.
What strikes me most about Hearo is how it addresses an anxiety that many of us probably never think about. Those of us with typical hearing take for granted that we’ll wake up if something goes wrong in the night. We don’t lie awake wondering if we’ll hear the smoke detector. We don’t stress about sleeping through our alarm. But for millions of people with hearing impairments, this anxiety is a nightly companion.
Hearo promises to change that. It offers something precious: peace of mind. The ability to take out your hearing aids, close your eyes, and actually rest, knowing that if something important happens, you’ll be alerted. That’s not just about better sleep. It’s about mental health, safety, and the fundamental right to feel secure in your own home at night. Sometimes the best designs aren’t flashy or complicated. They simply notice a problem that everyone else has overlooked and solve it with elegance and empathy. Hearo does exactly that, and in doing so, it might just transform bedtime for millions of people from a source of anxiety into what it should be: a time for rest and restoration.
The post Hearo Helps People With Hearing Loss Finally Sleep in Peace first appeared on Yanko Design.