Research of the hearing aid technique with bone-conducted ultrasound / 国际生物医学工程杂志

ABSTRACT

It was reported that human can perceive ultrasound with frequency ranges up to at least 120 kHz. Bone-conducted ultrasound perception has several medical applications, among which more attention has been paid to its application for hearing aid. The bone-conducted ultrasonic hearing aid technique can help the hearing-impaired retrieve hearing with bone-conducted ultrasound modulated by speech sounds. Studies of the characteristics and the perception mechanism of bone-conducted ultrasound are introduced in this paper and so as the bone-conducted ultrasonic hearing aid(BCUHA) developed by the Japanese Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. Current results show that the BCUHA can make more than 40 % of profoundly deaf subjects perceive sounds and 17 % recognize speech. The BCUHA exempt the hearing-impaired from suffering the surgery due to its non-invasiveness and is expected to have great application value.