Backend Infrastructure for a Ground-Breaking Communication Solution

An American start-up company offering cloud-based telephony services started out as a team of professionals with deep domain knowledge in digital signal processing and sonic clarity. The customer’s primary goal was to bring to market the best-in-class communication solution for people with partial hearing loss.

Challenge

Orion was involved in a groundbreaking project aimed to enable people with hearing loss to communicate via their smartphones and computers using ordinary headphones as a substitute for hearing aids.

The app was to perform a short assessment of individual hearing characteristics automatically making personalized fine-tuning and adjustments. After that, all incoming audio media would be modified to enhance the sound clarity and speech understanding.

Having their own resources for mobile apps development, the customers wanted us to take over all the backend and web client development. The project requirements included a number of third-party open source solutions to be used, which resulted in certain complications for our engineers.

Solution

The project execution commenced with developing a cloud server solution for the hearing app from scratch. It involved a team of our experts with a wide scope of experience in backend development for the telecommunication industry.

One of the challenges the team faced was performing integration of the service with several open source solutions. Some of them caused significant problems with the audio quality which degrades during various types of network disturbances. Therefore, we had to introduce numerous changes in the third-party source code apart from developing the cloud PBX solution. Ultimately, our professionals succeeded in fixing the issues.

Impact

From the very beginning, the app was highly appreciated by people with all types of hearing loss and by health professionals. Due to the unique sound clarity and rich functionality, it remains a one of a kind solution creating unparalleled opportunities for the end-users. Still, the customer is planning to further improve it by adding new features within the scope of an ongoing product enhancement.

A successful launch to the market allowed the customers to attract new investors for further product development and company growth.

Functions:

• User-specific digital audio signal modification
• Real-time tuning and calibrating for communicating in noisy environments
• Phone calls (iOS/Android/desktop PC or Web client)
• Stress testing system for performance and QoS evaluation
• Audio and video conferencing

Technologies:

Backend:

• Go
• C/C++
• FreeSWITCH
• Kamailio
• 2600Hz Kazoo
• Farstream
• Gstreamer

DevOps:

• Docker
• Ansible

Frontend:

• JavaScript