40% of Australians suffer from some form of hearing-impairment. Meaning hundreds of thousands of young athletes are excluded from regular team sport, because they can’t hear the referee’s whistle when it’s blown. So even if they are physically equal, they’re hindered by the fact that they need to keep watching the referee for signals, which prevents teams from taking the deaf on board. So as part of Samsung’s sponsorship of the Australian Netball Association and their commitment to using technology to benefit humankind, we created The Silent Whistle. The Silent Whistle is an app for the Samsung Galaxy Sport watch that picks up the frequency of a referee’s whistle and sends an instant vibrating alert to the hearing-impaired player. Leveraging the in-built microphone of the watch, the app is programmed to only listen for the exact frequency of the referee’s whistle and activate when it’s detected. To launch the app and get it on the right hands, we partnered with the Deaf Children Association of Australia to source deaf and hard of hearing netball players. We then trialled the app at social and club level games with extremely positive results of a 95% recognition rate up to 30 metres.