I am interested in technologies that could make sensory support more personal and responsive without removing the traveller from the environment completely. This paper stood out because Sona does not simply block all sound like conventional noise-cancelling headphones. It tries to reduce selected unwanted sounds while keeping other parts of the soundscape available.
That feels particularly relevant to an airport, where reducing noise may help but completely suppressing the environment could also remove important information such as announcements, staff instructions, alarms or other orientation cues.
This paper is also useful because it gives me a comparison point for biosensing. Sona is responsive and personalised without using physiological data. It responds to the acoustic environment and to the user's choices. That makes it useful for asking whether biosensing genuinely adds something, rather than assuming that every personalised system needs it.
Sona is a mobile soundscape-mediation system for people with sound sensitivity. It processes sound from the environment and lets the user selectively attenuate specific sounds rather than reducing everything equally.
The system can reduce multiple overlapping sounds at once, and the user can adjust the attenuation strength from 0% to 100%. This means a sound does not always need to disappear completely; it can be softened while still remaining audible.
Sona also uses sound recognition to suggest sounds that might be useful to attenuate. Users can accept or ignore these suggestions, and they can create their own custom sound classes by recording sounds from their environment.
What I find most important is that the technology is trying to create a filtered version of the real soundscape, rather than replacing the soundscape with silence.
The paper begins from a limitation of existing tools such as earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones. These can reduce discomfort, but they also suppress useful auditory information.
Sona therefore separates two needs that are often treated as the same thing: relief from bothersome sound and continued awareness of the environment.
The authors' formative survey with 68 people who experience sound sensitivity found substantial variation in which sounds were bothersome and how participants wanted them changed. Reduction and removal were the most common preferences, but the preferred level of intervention differed by sound type and perceived annoyance.
This is consistent with my wider project position that sensory support cannot be based on one fixed setting. The relevant question is not simply whether an airport is “quiet” or “loud”, but which sounds are difficult for a particular person, how strongly they want them changed, and which sounds they still need access to.
The paper uses the broad term people with sound sensitivity, including experiences such as misophonia and hyperacusis. The participants in the Sona study were recruited around sound-sensitivity experiences rather than autism specifically.
However, the paper directly connects sound sensitivity with autism literature. It cites a meta-analysis estimating hyperacusis in 41.4% of autistic people at the time of measurement and 60.6% at some point in their lives.
I need to keep this distinction clear. This does not mean Sona was tested as an autism intervention. It does show why personalised auditory accessibility is relevant to autistic experience and why a system that preserves useful sound while reducing selected triggers is worth investigating in my airport context.
Sona runs on a smartphone and processes incoming environmental audio in real time. The system uses a neural attenuation model that can target several selected sound classes in one pass.