Evaluation of Bone-Conducted Ultrasonic Hearing-Aid Regarding Transmission of Speaker Discrimination Information

Human listeners can perceive speech signals in a voicemodulated ultrasonic carrier from a bone-conduction stimulator, even if the listeners are patients with sensorineural hearing loss. Considering this fact, we have been developing a boneconducted ultrasonic hearing aid (BCUHA). The purpose of this study is to evaluate the usability of BCUHA regarding transmission of speaker discrimination information. For this purpose, a prototype of speaker discrimination test was developed. The test consists of 120 pairs of 10 words spoken by 10 speakers, and examinee is requested to judge the speakers of each pair are “same” or “different”. The usability of BCUHA was assessed by using the speaker discrimination test. The test was also conduced to air-conduction (AC) and cochlear implant simulator (CIsim) condition. The results show that BCUHA can transmit speaker information speaker as well as CIsim.