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HOW ECHO WORKS

A real-time, on-device safety system built to detect danger without recording sound.

All processing happens locally. No audio is ever stored.

System Overview

ECHO is an on-device acoustic safety system that detects abnormal and potentially dangerous sound events without recording, storing, or transmitting audio. Incoming sound is processed temporarily in memory, analyzed using feature-based AI, and permanently discarded after a decision is made. 

 

The system is intentionally designed as a closed loop: detect → decide → delete.

No Audio Retained

HOW ECHO WORKS

A real-time, on-device safety system built to detect danger without recording sound.

All processing happens locally. No audio is ever stored.

End-to-End Processing Pipeline

01

Temporary Sound Intake

Incoming sound is captured briefly and held only in volatile memory; no audio files are written to disk.

02

Acoustic Feature Transformation

Raw sound is converted into non-semantic features such as intensity, duration, and frequency patterns, excluding speech and identity information.

03

On-Device AI Inference

Potential events are verified across short time windows to reduce false alerts from benign or accidental noise.

04

Multi-Stage Temporal Validation

Potential events are verified across short time windows to reduce false alerts from benign or accidental noise.

05

Alert + Memory Clearance

If an event is confirmed, an alert is generated and all acoustic data is immediately erased from memory.

Privacy is enforced by system design, not by policy or user trust.

Hardware & Deployment Context

ECHO runs on low-cost edge hardware capable of continuous, real-time inference. The current prototype operates on Raspberry Pi–class devices, selected for predictable performance, affordability, and ease of deployment in institutional settings.

Reliability in Real Environments

  • Continuous operation validated under sustained runtime

  • Multi-stage validation reduces false positives

  • Noise adaptation improves stability across environments 

  • Continuous operation verified under sustained runtime

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