Development of a novel hearing-aid for the profoundly deaf using bone-conducted ultrasonic perception: Assessments of the modulation type with regard to articulation, intelligibility, and sound quality

Abstract

Bone-conducted ultrasound (BCU) is perceived even by the profoundly sensorineural deaf. We have developed a novel hearing-aid using BCU perception (BCU hearing aid: BCUHA) for the profoundly deaf. In the BCUHA, ultrasonic sinusoids of about 30 kHz are amplitude-modulated by speech and presented to the mastoid. Generally, two sounds are perceived: one is a high-pitched tone due to the ultrasonic carrier, with a pitch corresponding to a 8–16 kHz air-conducted (AC) sinusoid, and the other is the envelope of the modulated signal. As a method of amplitude modulation (AM), double-sideband with transmitted carrier (DSB-TC) modulation had been used; however, the DSB-TC is accompanied by a strong high-pitched tone. In this study, two new AM methods, double-sideband with suppressed carrier (DSB-SC) and transposed modulation (TM), that can be expected to reduce the high-pitched tone were newly employed in the BCUHA, and their resulting articulations, intelligibilities, and sound qualities were evaluated. The results showed that DSB-TC and TM had higher articulation and intelligibility scores than DSB-SC. Further, in terms of sound quality, the TM speech was closer than other types of BCU speech to AC speech. These results provide useful information for further development of the BCUHA.