2007 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
New Hearing Aid System Relieving Old Age People from Hearing Loss toward the Future Ubiquitous Society
| Project/Area Number |
18560372
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Communication/Network engineering
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| Research Institution | University of Fukui |
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Principal Investigator |
TAKAHASHI Kenzo University of Fukui, Graduate School of Engineering, Professor (50377470)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
FUJIEDA Shigeharu University of Fukui, Graduate School of Medical Science, Professor (30238539)
TANIGUCHI Shuji University of Fukui, Graduate School of Engineering, Associate Professor (70115301)
MORI Mikio University of Fukui, Graduate School of Engineering, Assistant Professor (70313731)
YAMAMOTO Takehito University of Fukui, Graduate School of Medical Science, Assistant Professor (80303379)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2006 – 2007
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| Keywords | Digital Hearing Aid / Networked / ZigBee / Air / Rime-conducted Sound / Logarithmic Frequency Warping / Nonlinear Warping / Old Age Type Hearing Loss / Ubiaquitous Connection |
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| Research Abstract |
This project was performed by the investigators through interschool collaboration between Graduate School of Engineering and Graduate School of Medical Science of University of Fukui Each school shared the academic activities For the project from the specialty viewpoint.
It becomes important due to the prompt increment of old age people with hearing keg to develop easy handling and low cost hearing aids. The hearing loss has a trend of monotonically increasing at higher frequencies on the logarithmic frequency axis. This project proposed a cosine type hearing aid circuit which can be easily controlled on the logarithmic frequency axis by warp (compress and expand) the frequency axis, and empirically verified by circuit installation and subjective test that it could efficiently compensate for the hearing loss, This project also studied the possibility of automatic control of hearing aid circuits in a short fitting time by feeding the cerebral evoked potential signal back to the hearing a
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id circuit, detected the correlation between the signal and input tone and it proved that a drastic improvement of measuring accuracy would be required Regarding the use of bone-conducted sounds, this project evaluated the preferable rate of air-conducted and bone-conducted sounds and found the most preferable rate with some occurrence probability through subjective test so that it verified the effectiveness of bone-conducted sounds and possible application to glass-type miniaturized hearing aid systems.
This project is based on the above mentioned fundamental research of hearing aid, studied to digitalize the hearing aid circuits and finally implemented a full-digital hearing aid circuit with a DSP-LSI element and warped the frequency axis by using first-order all pass networks in transversal connection, and realized the easily handled hearing aid function to given hearing loss patterns. It verified the hearing loss compensation with much better quality of hearing in a real environment.
This project also proposed the improvement of communications quality in an old age society by directly connecting many hearing aid users via wireless LAN functions to make up a networked hearing aid system, and designed a wireless LAN based hearing aid system using Bluetooth functions. Furthermore, it proposed another wireless LAN based hearing aid system for the future ubiquitous society, using ZigBee elements by extending the idea and empirically verified that it would reduce both transmission delay and power consumption down to the one over tenth of those of Bluetooth function based networked hearing aid system and it would accommodate extend the number of hearing aid users in a system from 6 users in the Bluetooth type system upto about 10,000 users in the ZigBee type system required for the application hire a hearing loss fist nursing home. Less
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