An Implantable Piezofilm Middle Ear Microphone: Performance in Human Cadaveric Temporal Bones
Purpose: One of the major reasons that totally implantable cochlear microphones are not readily available is the lack of good implantable microphones. An implantable microphone has the potential to provide a range of benefits over external microphones for cochlear implant users including the filtering ability of the outer ear, cosmetics, and usability in all situations. This paper presents results from experiments in human cadaveric ears of a piezofilm microphone concept under development as a possible component of a future implantable microphone system for use with cochlear implants. This microphone is referred to here as a drum microphone (DrumMic) that senses the robust and predictable motion of the umbo, the tip of the malleus. Methods: The performance was measured of five DrumMics inserted in four different human cadaveric temporal bones. Sensitivity, linearity, bandwidth, and equivalent input noise were measured during these experiments using a sound stimulus and measurement setup. Results: The sensitivity of the DrumMics was found to be tightly clustered across different microphones and ears despite differences in umbo and middle ear anatomy. The DrumMics were shown to behave linearly across a large dynamic range (46 dB SPL to 100 dB SPL) across a wide bandwidth (100 Hz to 8 kHz). The equivalent input noise (0.1-10 kHz) of the DrumMic and amplifier referenced to the ear canal was measured to be 54 dB SPL and estimated to be 46 dB SPL after accounting for the pressure gain of the outer ear. Conclusion: The results demonstrate that the DrumMic behaves robustly across ears and fabrication. The equivalent input noise performance was shown to approach that of commercial hearing aid microphones. To advance this demonstration of the DrumMic concept to a future prototype implantable in humans, work on encapsulation, biocompatibility, connectorization will be required.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
AnatomyMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
The UmboMic: A PVDF Cantilever Microphone
Objective: We present the "UmboMic," a prototype piezoelectric cantilever microphone designed for future use with totally-implantable cochlear implants. Methods: The UmboMic sensor is made from polyvinylidene difluoride …
End-to-end Two-dimensional Sound Source Localization With Ad-hoc Microphone Arrays
Conventional sound source localization methods are mostly based on a single microphone array that consists of multiple microphones. They are usually formulated as the estimation of the direction of arrival problem. In th…
Sound Source LocalizationA robust DOA estimation method for a linear microphone array under reverberant and noisy environments
A robust method for linear array is proposed to address the difficulty of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in reverberant and noisy environments. A direct-path dominance test based on the onset detection is utilized…
Onset DetectionAdding internal audio sensing to internal vision enables human-like in-hand fabric recognition with soft robotic fingertips
Distinguishing the feel of smooth silk from coarse cotton is a trivial everyday task for humans. When exploring such fabrics, fingertip skin senses both spatio-temporal force patterns and texture-induced vibrations that …
BrainDistill: Implantable Motor Decoding with Task-Specific Knowledge Distillation
Transformer-based neural decoders with large parameter counts, pre-trained on large-scale datasets, have recently outperformed classical machine learning models and small neural networks on brain-computer interface (BCI)…
Knowledge Distillation