• 재활복지
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.63-88
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• 2017

This study evaluated the actual status of special needs of the hearing-impaired person for disaster response. The analysis revealed a significant level of unmet needs in disaster response for hearing-impaired person. The 5 special needs in disaster response include: 1) communication needs, which involve securing the means to make an emergency rescue request and communicating information during the rescue process; 2) transportation needs, which indicate the effective evacuation capacity and the level of training; 3) medical needs, which address the degree of preparedness for physical and mental emergency measures and the delivery of health information for rescue and first aid process; 4) maintaining functional independence needs, which refer to the level of self-preparedness to minimize damage in disaster situations, and; 5) supervision needs, which correspond to a personalized support system provided to disaster-vulnerable groups.

• Child Health Nursing Research
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.352-360
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• 2008

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of an education program on health promotion behavior for students with hearing impairments. Method: For this study a nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest design was used. The three components of the study were: 1) the recognition of the importance of health promotion behavior, 2) formation of supportive networks, and 3) practice of health promotion behavior. The study population consisted of 38 students with hearing impairments (experimental group [19], control group [19]). The program was provided to students in the experimental group for 50-120 minutes, once a week for 3 weeks. Descriptive statistics, $X^2$-test, t-test, Fisher's exact test, and ANCOVA were used to analyze the data. Results: Perceived social support and health promotion behavior, but not self efficacy, were significantly different between the two groups. Conclusion: The result of this study indicate that this education program for health promotion behavior was effective for promoting perceived social support and health promotion behavior in students with hearing impairments, but further continuous research is needed to identify effective interventions to promote health behavior in students with hearing impairments and to allow for generalization of the results of this study.

• The Korean Journal of Community Living Science
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.41-50
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• 2012

This study was performed to understand the depression of children with hearing impairment with relation to their mothers' nurturing attitude and sign language level. The subjects were 131 hearing impaired children aged from 9 to 16 years and their mothers, who had no hearing impairments. The children's depression was assessed by CDI(Kovacs 1983) adapted by Cho and Lee(1990), and the maternal attitude was measured through the instrument developed by Oh and Lee(1982) and revised by Lim(1987). The results were as follows. First, the girls' depression was higher than the boys', and children in a dormitory type of school showed higher depression than those in a general type of school. Second, children's depression did not show differences according to mother-child communication methods but differed according to mothers' sign language level. Children whose mothers had high level of sign language showed the highest depression and those whose mothers had beginning level of sign language showed the lowest depression. And mothers' affective, goal- achieving and rational attitude were negatively related with children's depression. Third, the depression of hearing impairment children was influenced mainly by the maternal affective attitude, and the next order was the type of school the children attend.

• Journal of the Society of Disaster Information
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.76-83
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• 2023

Purpose: In emergency situations such as earthquakes, heavy rains, typhoons, or fires, when quick delivery of emergency alerts is crucial, the hearing impaired are the ones who are the most disadvantaged and vulnerable when alerts are only delivered through auditory or text alerts. They can't perceive auditory information, and many have difficulties in fast understanding text-based alerts. Method: An alert system that can deliver pictograms for specific disaster situations has been devised. Then, a novel approach based on artificial intelligence has been studied so that the pictograms for specific disaster situations can be chosen instantly once a disaster alert is issued in text. Result: A disaster alert system that delivers pictograms for specific disaster situations was developed and a novel method has been suggested for automatic delivery. Conclusion: A system to instantaneously deliver disaster alert information in pictograms has been developed to improve alert delivery to the populations vulnerable to disaster due to hearing impairment by the instantaneous understanding of disaster situations through visual information.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.282-290
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• 2006

We have developed a multi band digital hearing aid algorithm emphasizing feedback cancellation and a hardware module to evaluate the performance of our algorithm. The hearing aids should be able to compensate for individual hearing loss characteristics of hearing impaired person. Thus hearing aids need the function of multi-bands amplification and the capabilities of feedback cancellation that can remove howling caused by acoustic feedback. In this paper, we proposed a digital hearing aid algorithm which has multi-bands compensation using modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) and can efficiently remove acoustic feedbacks. Moreover, we have developed digital hearing aid hardware module, which can evaluate hearing aid algorithms in real time operation. The developed algorithm and hardware module were verified through computer simulation and clinical tests. Through operational experiments, good performances in real time operation environment and an efficient howling cancellation were also observed. The developed hardware module can operate in stable condition and it is expected to become a good hardware platform for developing hearing aid algorithms.

• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.91-98
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• 2020

Background and Objectives: This study aimed to compare functional hearing with the use of a personal sound amplification product (PSAP) or a basic hearing aid (HA) among sensorineural hearing impaired listeners. Subjects and Methods: Nineteen participants with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) (26-55 dB HL; pure-tone average, 0.5-4 kHz) were prospectively included. No participants had prior experience with HAs or PSAPs. Audiograms, speech intelligibility in both quiet and noisy environments, speech quality, and preference were assessed in three different listening conditions: unaided, with the HA, and with the PSAP. Results: The use of PSAP was associated with significant improvement in pure-tone thresholds at 1, 2, and 4 kHz compared to the unaided condition (all p<0.01). In the quiet environment, speech intelligibility was significantly improved after wearing a PSAP compared to the unaided condition (p<0.001), and this improvement was better than the result obtained with the HA. The PSAP also demonstrated similar improvement in the most comfortable levels compared to those obtained with the HA (p<0.05). However, there was no significant improvement of speech intelligibility in a noisy environment when wearing the PSAP (p=0.160). There was no significant difference in the reported speech quality produced by either device or in participant preference for the PSAP or HA. Conclusions: The current result suggests that PSAPs provide considerable benefits to speech intelligibility in a quiet environment and can be a good alternative to compensate for mild-to-moderate SNHL.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.91-98
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• 2020

Background and Objectives: This study aimed to compare functional hearing with the use of a personal sound amplification product (PSAP) or a basic hearing aid (HA) among sensorineural hearing impaired listeners. Subjects and Methods: Nineteen participants with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) (26-55 dB HL; pure-tone average, 0.5-4 kHz) were prospectively included. No participants had prior experience with HAs or PSAPs. Audiograms, speech intelligibility in both quiet and noisy environments, speech quality, and preference were assessed in three different listening conditions: unaided, with the HA, and with the PSAP. Results: The use of PSAP was associated with significant improvement in pure-tone thresholds at 1, 2, and 4 kHz compared to the unaided condition (all p<0.01). In the quiet environment, speech intelligibility was significantly improved after wearing a PSAP compared to the unaided condition (p<0.001), and this improvement was better than the result obtained with the HA. The PSAP also demonstrated similar improvement in the most comfortable levels compared to those obtained with the HA (p<0.05). However, there was no significant improvement of speech intelligibility in a noisy environment when wearing the PSAP (p=0.160). There was no significant difference in the reported speech quality produced by either device or in participant preference for the PSAP or HA. Conclusions: The current result suggests that PSAPs provide considerable benefits to speech intelligibility in a quiet environment and can be a good alternative to compensate for mild-to-moderate SNHL.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.265-270
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• 2014

Hearing-impaired people have difficulty in hearing, so it is also hard for them to learn letters that represent sound and text that conveys complex and abstract concepts. Therefore it has been natural choice for the hearing-impaired people to use sign language for communication, which employes facial expression, and hands and body motion. However, the major communication methods in daily life are text and speech, which are big obstacles for the hearing-impaired people to access information, to learn and make intellectual activities, and to get jobs. As delivering information via internet become common the hearing-impaired people are experiencing more difficulty in accessing information since internet represents information mostly in text forms. This intensifies unbalance of information accessibility. This paper reports web-based text-to-sign language translating system that helps web designer to use sign language in web page design. Since the system is web-based, if web designers are equipped with common computing environment for internet browsing, they can use the system. The web-based text-to-sign language system takes the format of bulletin board as user interface. When web designers write paragraphs and post them through the bulletin board to the translating server, the server translates the incoming text to sign language, animates with 3D avatar and records the animation in a MP4 file. The file addresses are fetched by the bulletin board and it enables web designers embed the translated sign language file into their web pages by using HTML5 or Javascript. Also we analyzed text used by web pages of public services, then figured out new words to the translating system, and added to improve translation. This addition is expected to encourage wide and easy acceptance of web pages for hearing-impaired people to public services.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.261-270
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• 2018

Hearing-impaired people are increasing rapidly due to the global aging trend. Early detection of hearing loss requires an easy-to-use audiometry device for the public. Existing audiometry systems were developed as PC-based, PDA-based, or smartphone apps. These devices were often dependent on specific software platforms and hardware platforms. In this paper, we tried to improve software platform compatibility by using cross platform, and tried to implement IoT-based pure tone audiometry device which does not require sound pressure level correction due to hardware differences. Pure tone audiometry is available in a variety of ways depending on the type of hearing loss and age. Using the IoT-based audiometry device implemented in this paper, it will be possible for an app developer who lacks hardware knowledge to easily develop an app with various scenarios for hearing screening. The results of this study will contribute to overcoming the software and hardware dependency in the development of IoT-based healthcare device.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.385-394
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• 2010

Automatic gain control(AGC) is used in hearing aids to compensate for the hearing level as to reduced dynamic range. AGC is consisted of the main 4 factors which are compression threshold, compression ratio, attack time, and release time. This study especially focus on each individual need for optimum release time parameters that can be changed within 7 certain range such as 12, 64, 128, 512, 2094, and 4096ms. To estimate the effect of various release time in AGC, twelve normal hearing and twelve hearing impaired listeners are participated. The stimuli are used by one syllable and sentence which have the same acoustic energy respectively. Then, each of score of the word recognition score is checked in quiet and noise conditions. As a result, it is verified that most people have the different best recognition score on specific release time. Also, if hearing aids is set by the optimum release time in each person, it is helpful in speech recognition and discrimination.