Dad Details How The Noise App on Apple Watch Helped His Son With Autism

We regularly hear feel-good instances about how the various health features on the Apple Watch have saved lives over the years. Be it detecting something amiss with the heart rate or notifying family and emergency services in case of a bad fall, the Apple Watch has remained the benchmark fitness wearable. The new Noise app on watchOS is also joining in on helping users. Scott Bennett, 59, from Texas has detailed how the Noise app helped his son deal with autism. The Noise app on the Apple Watch is one of the new features of watchOS 6, and it can be used to monitor the ambient noise levels with notifications for when the noise becomes uncomfortably loud.

Bennett says his son, 21-year old Alex, is quite a social butterfly and people fall in love with him instantly. However, he has had trouble modulating his speech. “For years we’ve been struggling with this, since he started talking… and the voice level is really, really, really loud,” Bennett told People. Scott says they tried pretty much everything to help Alex with his voice modulation, but while some of the solutions did provide a temporary fix, nothing really sorted the problem. “We just can’t go places. He’s also got a short attention span, too, so you put all these things together, and it’s hard on the family,” says Scott. “You learn to adapt, but it’s always tough, and especially for a guy like me who thrives on silence, I got blessed with the loudest human being on the planet.”

It was just recently that Scott discovered the Noise app on his Apple Watch, an accidental discovery while updating some other apps one morning. “My first thought was, ‘I gotta try this with Sam. Why didn’t I think of this sooner?’ Because we had tried everything,” Scott recalls to People.

“He immediately saw that and started using his own voice to make it work, and then immediately started talking really quietly,” he says. Alex uses the decibel readings from the Noise app to adjust his volume. Scott has shared the Noise app experience on a Facebook Group for parents of children with special needs, and he is happy that people are responding. Though he does wish that if the Noise app technology was available for Alex when he was a child, it would have made a big difference for Alex as he would have grown up being able to gauge his voice.