Gargi Agrawalla built a smoke alarm for people who can't hear, and it won the British James Dyson Award.

A product design graduate from Loughborough University has won this year's British James Dyson Award for an alarm built for deaf people, which signals a fire or a knock at the door with light and vibration, the BBC reported on 17 September.

Gargi Agrawalla, 23, is profoundly deaf and wears cochlear implants. The external processors come off when she sleeps, showers or travels, and she told the BBC the idea came out of hotel rooms, where the alarms and the doorbells and the signals are not always visual, tactile or accessible.

The room

Deaf travellers who want that covered carry several separate devices, or ask for one of the handful of adapted rooms a hotel keeps, and Agrawalla wanted one thing in a bag that would do the lot.

The device

The main unit is handheld and runs the sound recognition on its own chip, with no Wi-Fi and nothing going out to a cloud, and it is trained to pick out fire alarms and doorbells. A second piece, a small round sensor, picks up knocking and the door moving. The warning comes back as coloured light and a symbol on the screen, with a vibration she can turn up or down.

I use AI sound recognition to detect emergency sounds. For example, fire alarm, doorbell, door knock.Gargi Agrawalla

The award

The James Dyson Award is run from Malmesbury by the James Dyson Foundation and goes to engineering and design students. Rumyana Dancheva, a lead design engineer at Dyson, called it a brilliant example of a simple solution to a complex problem.

Agrawalla told the BBC that the win gave her confidence the problems she had run into in hotel rooms are worth taking seriously. She built it for her final-year project, and she calls it SIVO.GO.