Evaluation of Bone-conduction Headsets for Use in Multitalker Communication Environments

Standard audio headphones are useful in many applications, but they cover the ears of the listener and thus may impair the perception of ambient sounds. Bone-conduction headphones offer a possible alternative, but traditionally their use has been limited to monaural applications due to the high propagation speed of sound in the human skull. Here we show that stereo bone-conduction headsets can be used to provide a limited amount of interaural isolation in a dichotic speech perception task. The results suggest that reliable spatial separation is possible with bone-conduction headsets, but that they probably cannot be used to lateralize signals to extreme left or right apparent locations.