Doing DSP in your phone or other android device might become really
difficult, really fast.  In any case, I'd recommend that you get one
of those development boards which runs Android and work with that to
start.  No need to sacrifice your phone ahead of time.

Also, instead of listening for sounds, maybe you can wire up a
dedicated device into the home which would talk directly to the haptic
device or the glasses?

My brother went to RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) and they
have a large deaf population there, to the extent that some dorms are
fitted out with the bright stobe lights used to wake/alert deaf people
of fire alarms, etc.

Listening for arbitrary sounds and trying to match them to a library
of triggers sounds (sorry for the pun) like a very hard problem.  Even
apple is doing Siri by sending your speech to a remote datacenter for
processing, since the phones don't have enough juice.  Admittedly,
that's a more difficult problem space, but it is similar and less open
ended than your problem space.  

Just hooking an Arduino into my doorbell/phone/other sensors and
having the arduino talk to the alerting system might be a simpler way
to do it.

John
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