• 한국멀티미디어학회논문지
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• 제19권2호
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• pp.375-385
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• 2016

Recently, several implantable hearing aids such as cochlear implant, middle ear implant, etc., which have a module receiving power and signal from outside the body, are frequently used to treat the hearing impaired patients. Most of implantable hearing aids are adopted permanent magnet pairs to couple between internal and external devices for the enhancement of power transmission. Generally, the internal device which containing the magnet in the center of receiving coil is implanted under the skin of human temporal bone. In case of MRI scanning of a patient with the implantable hearing aid, however, homogeneous magnetic fields of the MRI might be interfered by the implanted magnet. For the above reasons, the MR image is degraded by large area of artifact, so that diagnostics are almost impossible in deteriorated region. In this paper, we proposed an external coil system that can reduce the artifact of MR image due to the internal coupling magnet. By finite element analysis estimating area of MR artifact according to varying current and shape of the external coil, optimal coil parameters were extracted. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed external coil system was verified by confirming the artifact at real MRI scan.

• 센서학회지
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• 제19권6호
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• pp.449-455
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• 2010

Implantable middle ear hearing devices(IMEHDs) have being actively studied to overcome the problems of conventional hearing aids. Vibration transducer, an output devices of IMEHDs, is attached on the ossicular chain and transmits mechanical vibration to cochlea. This approach allows us to hear more clear sound because mechanical vibration is effective to transfer high frequency acoustics, but occurs some problems such as fatigue accumulation to ossicular chian and reduction of vibration displacement caused by mass loading effect. Recently, many studies for the round window stimulation are announced, because it does not cause such problems. It have been studied by older transducers designed for attaching on ossicular chain. In this paper, we proposed a new electromagnetic transducer which consists of two magnets, three coils and a vibration membrane. The magnet assembly, magnet coupled in opposite direction, were placed in the center of three coils, and the optimum length of each coil generating maximum vibrational force was calculated by finite element analysis(FEA). The transducer was implemented as the calculated length of each coil, and measured vibration displacement. From the results, it is verified the vibration displacement can be improved by optimizing the length of coils.