Tongue based hearing enhancement system

The number of hearing impaired people have been getting increased all over the world. Cochlear implantation is considered as a primary treatment of high degree hearing impairment. However, there still exist some risks and side effects of this surgical procedure even though there have been a lot of trials and researches over few decades since the first surgery had been conducted because it is invasive way. In this study, we made a system that can help people to recognize the sound better when they have some trouble in hearing by giving them stimulus on their tongue in non-invasive way. We used a ready-made device for giving the stimulus on tongue and implemented a computer program for training the user by guessing the right answer after hearing the sound with the ear and perceiving electric stimulus with the tongue at the same time. To organize the system with this device, we made a cochlear implant system simulator to generate the electric signal for stimulation with Matlab script language to realize all the steps in cochlear implant system. Also, we made a computer program that synchronizes with the device and trains the user by accepting and recording the user?s activity in the Visual C# IDE for convenient construction of GUI program. We undertook an experiment with three subjects to verify the effect of this system. During the experiment, the subjects were trained with this system for 15 days with the vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) sound samples. After training of that period, the two subjects showed great improvement of almost 49% in recognizing sounds with the stimuli in a hardly-hearing situation compared to recognizing them with hearing only in the same situation.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

masters

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

National University of Ireland Maynooth

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Cha, Suhyun

Language dc:language

en