• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers C
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• v.49 no.10
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• pp.583-588
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• 2000

This paper presents the design and fabrication of micro electromagnetic vibration silicon elastic body characterized with small size, high efficiency and selective frequency bandwidth for Bio-MENS applications, such as implantable middle ear hearing aid. The presented electromagnetic vibration transducer that composed of wounded coil, permanent magnet and 4-beam cross type elastic body is fabricated by using of micromachining technology. The fabricated transducer has experimental characteristics, that is 5 nm/mA of an energy trasfer rate at the frequency range of 100∼2800 Hz. It has a size of $2{\times}2{\times}2.5\;mm^3$.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.21-25
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• 2009

Generally, fully implantable middle ear hearing device (F-IMEHD) is implanted under the skin nearby human temporal bone with all components including implantable microphone and vibration transducer. The microphone and transducer have different characteristic before and after implant. Fitting process is performed for this characteristic change of them and proper performance of hearing aids for each patient. Conventional hearing aids and partially implantable hearing aids, they have wired connector for fitting process. However in case of F-IMEHD, it is difficult this wired connection, because all components of F-IMEHD is implanted. In this paper, fitting software that can be apply wireless fitting hardware for F-IMEHD has been designed and implemented. It can find out proper fitting parameter reflecting characteristics of the microphone and transducer for patients who has difficulty in hearing.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.189-199
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• 2016

Many implantable hearing aids are being developed as alternatives to conventional hearing aids which has inconveniences for use and social stigma that make hearing-impaired people avoid to wear it. Particularly, the fully-implantable middle ear hearing devices (F-IMEHD) are being actively studied for mixed or sensorineural hearing impaired people. In development of F-IMEHD, the most difficult problem is improving the performance of implantable microphone. Recently, Cho et al. have studied the tympanic membrane installed microphone which has better sensitivity and is easier to operate on patient than the microphone implanted under the skin. But, it may cause howling problem due to the feedback signal via oval window and ossicle chain from the transducer on round window in the middle ear cavity, therefore, a feedback canceller is necessary. In this paper, we designed NLMS (normalized least mean square) adaptive feedback canceller for F-IMEHD with tympanic membrane installed microphone and a transducer implemented at round window, and computer simulation was performed to verify its operation. The designed adaptive feedback canceller has a delay filter, a 64 point FIR fixed filter and a 8-tap adaptive FIR filter. Computer simulation of the feedback path is modeled by using the data obtained through human cadaver experiment.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.361-368
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• 2010

ACROSS device, which is composed of an implantable microphone, a signal processor, and a vibrating transducer, is a fullyimplantable middle ear hearing device(F-IMEHD) for the recovery of patients with hearing loss. And since a microphone is implanted under skin and tissue at the temporal bones, the amplitude of the sound wave is attenuated by absorption and scattering. And the vibrating transducer attached to the ossicular chain caused also the different displacement from characteristic of the stapes. For the gain control of auditory signals, most of implantable hearing devices with the digital audio signal processor still apply to fitting rules of conventional hearing aid without regard to the effect of the implanted microphone and the vibrating transducer. So it should be taken into account the effect of the implantable microphone and the vibrating transducer to use the conventional audio fitting rule. The aim of this study was to measure gain characteristics caused by the implanted microphone and the vibrating transducer attached to the ossicle chains for the gain compensation of ACROSS device. Differential floating mass transducers (DFMT) of ACROSS device were clipped on four cadaver temporal bones. And after placing the DFMT on them, displacements of the ossicle chain with the DFMT operated by 1 $mA_{peak}$ current was measured using laser Doppler vibrometer. And the sensitivity of microphones under the sampled pig skin and the skin of 3 rat back were measured by stimulus of pure tones in frequency from 0.1 to 8.9 kHz. And we confirmed that the microphone implanted under skin showed poorer frequency response in the acoustic high-frequency band than it in the low- to mid- frequency band, and the resonant frequency of the stapes vibration was changed by attaching the DFMT on the incus, the displacement of the DFMT driven with 1 $mA_{rms}$ was higher by the amount of about 20 dB than that of cadaver's stapes driven by the sound presssure of 94 dB SPL in resonance frequency range.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1996 no.05
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• pp.243-247
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• 1996

Electro-magnetic type implantable middle ear hearing aid has been empirically developed. But for further improvement of the system performance more quantitative approach is necessary. In this paper, we analyzed vibrating transducer which is most important to design the system, appropriate for given hearing level, and implemented it. Using this transducer, implantable hearing aid system are developed. To verify the design process, we experimented with driving metal strip by the developed system. From the experiment, frequency response of implemented device showed good characteristic at audio frequency and we confirmed that each part of the developed system operated well.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.49-56
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• 2004

A low power consuming voice signal processing and control module was designed using a small $\mu$-controller for use in a totally implantable middle ear system. The module was designed that it can control the implanted system as well as process the fitting algorithm of input sound signal. In ordinary operation mode, the $\mu$-controller processes the applied sound signal for compensating the hearing loss of the patients. When the control signal is applied from the IR receiving module, the $\mu$-controller interrupts the signal processing and executes the order of the control signals such as power on/off, volume up/down. The designed module was implemented and verified the performance of the system through several experiments.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.539-548
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• 2007

In the paper, a wireless charger with the function of auto-shutdown for fully implantale middle ear hearing devices (F-IMEHD) has been designed. The wireless charger can communicate with an implant module to be turned off automatically shutdown after an internal rechargeable battery has been fully-charged by electromagnetic coupling using two coils. For the communication with an implant module, the wireless charger uses the load shift keying (LSK) method. But, the variation of the mutual inductance due to the different distance between two coils can cause the communication error in receiving the fully-charged signal from an implant module. To solve the problem, the implemented wireless charger has a variable reference generator for LSK communication. The wireless charger generates proper level of the reference voltage for a comparator using an ADC (analog-to-digital converter) and a DAC (digital-to-analog converter). Through the result of experiment, it has been confirmed that the presented wireless charger can detect signals from implantable module. And wireless charger can stop generating electromagnetic flux after an implanted battery has been fully charged in spite of variable coil distance according to different skin thickness.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.78-84
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• 2005

A contactless recharging device for totally implantable middle ear systems has been designed as a pillow type that the user can recharge the implanted battery with taking a rest. The proposed device uses the electromagnetic coupling between the transmitting coil and the receiving coil. To supply sufficient power for the implanted circuits, each coil uses LC resonance and the implanted device uses voltage doubler. A power MOSFET is used for switching the DC voltage of LC parallel circuit and the switching frequency demands on a programmable frequency generator which is controlled by microcontroller. In order to improve the electromagnetic coupling efficiency at specific positions of coil which may vary with the displacement of head, the optimal location of receiving coil was studied, and the 5 transmitting coils in a pillow for recharging the implant module was designed. From such a recharging experiment, it was found that the proposed device could provide the sufficient operating voltage within the distance of 4 cm between pillow and the implanted device.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.223-230
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• 2006

An FIR filter for digital voice signal processing has been designed and implemented using a microcontroller in implantable middle ear hearing devices (IMEHDs). The designed digital voice signal processing filter which has fast and accurate filtering operation and controllable filter characteristics has been implemented using a hardware multiplier and a direct memory access (DMA) in the low power microcontroller, MSP430F169. It has been confirmed that each of the implemented 6-orders Remez FIR filters with 1 channel and 2 channels can be applied to the voice signal processing module of IMEHDs based on the evaluation results of the filtering performance experiment.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.217-225
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• 2002

The implantable middle ear(IME) system, which has good sound quality. superior sound intelligibility and wide frequency characteristics. can resolve the sound distortion and ringing effect by sound feedback at high gain operation those are the major problems of conventional hearing aid. In this paper, we have manufactured the IME system using differential electromagnetic transducer(DET) and verified the performance of the system by carrying out vibration and animal implanting experiment. The DET was manufactured using micro-machining technology and vibration experiment of the transducer was performed to inspect whether the transducer could vibrate in accordance with the applied sound signal or not. And the result of the loaded experiment using temporal bone sampled from cadaver showed that the transducer can drive the middle ear bone and transmit the signal to inner ear After the internal unit of IME system was implanted in a dog. the auditory brainstem response (ABR) test was carried out. The result of the test indicated the Proper behavior of the IME system in the living body From the results of the experiments, it is verified that the manufactured system ewll work well when it is applied to human and a basis of clinical experiment of IME system to real human hearing impaired was be arranged.