• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.47-54
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• 2013

Electrical stimulation is delivered to auditory nerve (AN) through the electrodes in cochlear implant system. Neurogram is a spectrogram that includes information of neural response to electrical stimulation. We hypothesized that the similarity between a neurogram and an input-sound spectrogram could show how well a cochlear implant system works. In this study, we evaluated electrical stimulus configuration of CIS strategy using the computational model. The computational model includes stochastic property and anatomical features of cat auditory nerve fiber. To evaluate similarity between a neurogram and an input-sound spectrogram, we calculated Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). The results show that the dynamic range and the stimulation rate per channel influenced SSIM. Finally, we suggested the optimal configuration within the given stimulus CIS. We expect that the results and the evaluating procedure could be employed to improve the performance of a cochlear implant system.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2017.11a
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• pp.1045-1048
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• 2017

기존에 있는 발음연습 앱이 청소년 청각장애인이 언어치료용으로 사용하기에 부적절한 이유와 그들에게 맞는 언어치료 앱 도입 필요 이유를 설명한다. 현장에서 일하시는 언어치료사와 청각장애인의 의견을 수용하여 개발한 청소는 청각장애인을 위한 앱의 시스템 구성도와 서비스 흐름도, 개발 앱의 기능과 기술, 사용자 시나리오를 설명하여 인공와우를 이식받은 청소년 청각장애인이 언어치료 앱인 '발연기'를 통해 어떻게 언어치료를 받을 수 있을지에 대한 연구이다.

• Elastomers and Composites
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.98-105
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• 2009

The cochlea of the inner ear has two core components, basilar membrane and hair cells. The basilar membrane disperses incoming sound waves by their frequencies. The hair cells are on the basilar membrane, and they are the sensory receptors generating bioelectric signals. In this paper, a biomimetic technology using ZnO piezoelectric nano-pillar was studied as the part of developing process for artificial cochlea and novel artificial mechanosensory system mimicking human auditory senses. In particular, ZnO piezoelectric nano-pillar was fabricated by both low and high temperature growth methods. ZnO piezoelectric nano-pillars were grown on solid (high temperature growth) and flexible (low temperature growth) substrates. The substrates were patterned prior to ZnO nano-pillar growth so that we can selectively grow ZnO nano-pillar on the substrates. A multi-physical simulation was also conducted to understand the behavior of ZnO nano-pillar. The simulation results show electric potential, von Mises stress, and deformation in the ZnO nano-pillar. Both the experimental and computational works help characterize and optimize ZnO nano-pillar.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.207-215
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• 2004

A finite element analysis is used in this study to model 6 kinds of electrode by a genetic program in order to evaluate the mechanical effect on the 3D human cochlea model and the behavior of electrode. Human cochlea is modeled by the spiral-approximation method and the shape of scala tympani is extracted from the mid section of the human cochlea. Contact pressure at the tip and the insertion force are found to be highest when the wires stack horizontally. Axial rotation of electrode is minimal comparing with the stimulating current spread. The results indicate that the electrode stiffness is important to minimize the trauma.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.271-279
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• 2007

We suggest a novel method for the evaluation of cochlear implant (CI) speech processing strategy based on neural spike train decoding. From formant trajectories of input speech and auditory nerve responses responding to the electrical pulse trains generated from a specific CI speech processing strategy, optimal linear decoding filter was obtained, and used to estimate formant trajectory of incoming speech. Performance of a specific strategy is evaluated by comparing true and estimated formant trajectories. We compared a newly-developed strategy rooted from a closer mimicking of auditory periphery using nonlinear time-varying filter, with a conventional linear-filter-based strategy. It was shown that the formant trajectories could be estimated more exactly in the case of the nonlinear time-varying strategy. The superiority was more prominent when background noise level is high, and the spectral characteristic of the background noise was close to that of speech signals. This confirms the superiority observed from other evaluation methods, such as acoustic simulation and spectral analysis.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.694-702
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• 2007

The adaptation effect originating from the chemical synapse between auditory nerve and inner hair cell gives advantage in accurate representation of temporal cues of incoming speech such as speech onset. Thus it is expected that the modification of conventional speech processing strategies of cochlear implant(CI) by incorporating the adaptation effect will result in considerable improvement of speech perception performance such as consonant perception score. Our purpose in this paper was to evaluate our new CI speech processing strategy incorporating the adaptation effect by the observation of auditory nerve responses. By classifying the presence or absence of speech from the auditory nerve responses, i. e. spike trains, we could quantitatively compare speech onset detection performances of conventional and improved strategies. We could verify the effectiveness of the adaptation effect in improving the speech onset representation characteristics.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.203-212
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• 2007

This study was to compare some acoustic characteristics of vowels produced by children with cochlear implant (CI) and the children with normal hearing. 20 subjects under ten years old were further classified into two groups (one group of CI children under four years old and the other group of CI children over four years old). For the normal hearing group, 20 subjects are participated in the experiment. Some acoustic parameters including fundamental frequency (F0) and formant frequencies (F1, F2) were measured in the two groups according to the age of cochlear implant operation. For the CI group, three comer vowels (/a/, /i/, /u/) were recorded five times in isolation and analyzed with Multi-Speech (Kay Elemetrics, model 3700), and two independent t-tests on their formant data were conducted using SPSS 11.5. The result showed that the implanted group over four years had a significant difference in F0 and F1 comparing with the implanted group under four years of age as well as the normal hearing group. Those values of the children with the implanted group under four years old were closer to those of the children with the normal hearing. As to the F2, there was no significant difference among implanted groups. However, it was shown that the vowel space for the implanted groups regardless the operation age indicated much smaller than that for the normal hearing children. This acoustic results suggest that CI surgery would be much more effective if it is done under the age of four years old.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.91-99
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• 2014

Although it is well documented that patients with cochlear implant experience hearing difficulties when processing their first language, very little is known whether or not and to what extent cochlear implant patients recognize segments in a second language. This preliminary study examines how Korean learners of English identify English segments in a normal hearing and cochlear implant simulation conditions. Participants heard English vowels and consonants in the following three conditions: normal hearing condition, 12-channel noise vocoding with 0mm spectral shift, and 12-channel noise vocoding with 3mm spectral shift. Results confirmed that nonnative listeners could also retrieve spectral information from vocoded speech signal, as they recognized vowel features fairly accurately despite the vocoding. In contrast, the intelligibility of manner and place features of consonants was significantly decreased by vocoding. In addition, we found that spectral shift affected listeners' vowel recognition, probably because information regarding F1 is diminished by spectral shifting. Results suggest that patients with cochlear implant and normal hearing second language learners would experience different patterns of listening errors when processing their second language(s).

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.67-78
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• 2016

This study examined the affective prosodic characteristics observed from the children with cochlear implant (CI, hereafter) and normal hearing (NH, hereafter) along with listener's perception on them. Speech samples were acquired from 15 normal and 15 CI children. 8 SLPs(Speech Language Pathologists) perceptually evaluated affective types using Praat's ExperimentMFC. When it comes to the acoustic results, there were statistically meaningful differences between 2 groups in affective types [joy (discriminated by intensity deviation), anger (by intensity-related variables dominantly and duration-related variables partly), and sadness (by all aspects of prosodic variables)]. CI's data are much more louder when expressing joy, louder and slower when expressing anger, and higher, louder, and slower when it comes to sadness than those of NH. The listeners showed much higher correlation when evaluating normal children than CI group(p<.001). Chi-square results revealed that listeners did not show coherence at CI's utterance, but did at those of NH's (CI(p<.01), normal(p=.48)). When CI utterances were discriminated into 3 emotional types by DA(Discriminant Analysis) using 8 acoustic variables, speed related variables such as articulation rate took primary role.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.197-202
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• 2005

The cochlear implantation(CI) as an useful tool for aural rehabilitation in bilateral severe to profound hearing impairment. However, CI prefer to usually one ear in spite of bilateral hearing impaired. because of the various characteristics of hearing loss, the hearing conservation for the future possibility, and socioeconomic condition of hearing impaired person and their families. The unilateral CI has limitations such as a directional loss, a difficult speech understanding in noise and a neural plasticity. These limitations will be overcome by hearing aid(HA) which is familiar with hearing impairer. but HA fitting for bimodal-binaural hearing are difficult because the difference output characteristic of HA and CI. This study will be confirm realities of use of HA in unilateral cochlear implantee. For this goal, 25(m:f=10:15) child participated who are used to HA for 1 to 17 months. We had telephone interviews with their mother about use of HA, change of auditory performance and own voice. As the results, hearing threshold levels of unimplanted ear, the use of a appropriate HA, implanted and aided hearing threshold level(HTL) are must be considered for successful biomodal-binaural hearing. Especially, implanted and aided HTL should be very useful parameter for a prediction of HA effect and a criterion of selection for bilateral cochlear implantation.