Samsung Good Vibes — Co-Designed Morse-Code Messaging App for Deafblind People, with Sense India

Good Vibes is a two-way messaging app that lets deafblind people send and receive messages via Morse-code-style vibration patterns on a smartphone. It was developed by Samsung R&D Institute India in partnership with Sense India, a national NGO for people who are deafblind, and launched on 9 September 2019, pre-loaded on donated Galaxy A20 phones distributed through Sense India.

According to Samsung's own account and PTI/Business Standard reporting from the launch, the app was developed over roughly two years through iterative workshops with Sense India educators, deafblind users and caregivers in Delhi and Bengaluru, in which notification timing, vibration duration and intervals, and on-screen text sizing were changed directly in response to feedback from deafblind participants. Samsung's own estimate, cited in the same coverage, is that approximately 500,000 people in India are deafblind. One named user, Waqar Shaikh, is reported to have learned to write and understand full sentences in Morse code after only a few training sessions.

The evidence base for this practice has real limits worth stating plainly: both sources traced for this record originate from the same September 2019 Samsung press event, so they are not independent of one another; the 500,000-person prevalence estimate is Samsung's own figure, not an independently audited census number; and no post-launch adoption, download or active-usage data was found in any available source, so the practice's real-world reach beyond the initial co-design workshops and launch cohort could not be verified.

Read the full analysis: https://news.samsung.com/in/samsung-good-vibes-and-relumino-to-brighten-up-lives-of-the-deafblind-and-vision-impaired