Bone-conducted (BC) speech in an extremely noisy environment is stable against surrounding noise so that it may be able to be used instead of air-conducted (AC) speech for communication. However, it has very poor sound quality and its intelligibility is degraded when transmitted through bone conduction. Therefore, voice-quality and the intelligibility of BC speech need to be blindly improved in...

Analytic and numerical models are used to study bone-conducted sound and how it relates to the vibrational modes of the human skull. The analytic model is based on the solution to the acoustic and elastic wave equations and the constraining boundary conditions for a fluid-filled elastic sphere. Both models predict that most of the acoustic energy of bone-conducted sound exists in the form of su...

OBJECTIVE Galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) delivered as zero-mean current noise (noisy GVS) has been shown to improve static and dynamic postural stability probably by enhancing vestibular information. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of an imperceptible level noisy GVS on ocular vestibular-evoked myogenic potentials (oVEMPs) in response to bone-conducted vibration (BCV)...

Human listeners can perceive speech signals in a voice modulated 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 the BCUHA regarding perception of Japanese prosodic phone...

.......................................................................................................... 1 LIST OF PAPERS .................................................................................................. 3 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 5 Background of bone-conducted sound ..........................

T. Sakaguchi, T. Hirano, T. Nishimura, S. Nakagawa, Y. Watanabe, H. Hosoi, S. Imaizumi, and M. Tonoike Department of Electronics, Doshisha University, Kyo-Tanabe, Kyoto 610-0321, Japan; Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Nara Medical University, Kashihara, Nara 634-8522, Japan; MEG Section, Life Electronics Research Ctr., Electrotechnical Lab., Ikeda, Osaka 563-8577, Japan; Department of Speech...

Use of virtual reality (VR) technology is often accompanied by a series of unwanted symptoms, including nausea and headache, which are characterised as 'simulator sickness'. Sensory mismatch has been thought to lie at the heart of the problem and recent studies have shown that reducing cue mismatch in VR can have a therapeutic effect. Specifically, electrical stimulation of vestibular afferent ...

CONCLUSION Saccular dysfunction is a major cause of balance problems in patients with otosclerosis. Vestibular-evoked myogenic potential in response to bone-conducted sound (BC-VEMP) testing is useful for diagnosis of these patients. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to elucidate the origin of balance problems in patients with otosclerosis using BC-VEMP. METHODS Subjects comprised 25...

Auditory brainstem response (ABR) thresholds to air- and bone-conducted clicks were investigated in 40 full-term neonates. Subjects were divided into two groups of 20 according to postpartum age: less than 48 hours and between 49 and 96 hours. Mean ABR thresholds to air- and bone-conducted clicks for neonates less than 48 hours postpartum were 14.5 dB nHL (51.5 dB peak SPL) and 1.8 dB nHL (36.8...

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). This paper reports an evaluation of the BCUHA; the evaluation was carried out by considering the transmission of par...